I know the people behind statments like these are coming to it with extremly unintelligent and bad faith definitions and intentions, but the actual words are actually correct. If you had the option to delay humanity's discovery of atomic bombs to late 20th century or after, and therefore delay any substantial deep understanding of the atomic physics beneath, you would probably do it. If you had the atomic bomb, you probably wouldn't have shared it with Stalin's USSR or Hitler's Germany and, for that matter, Roosevelt's USA. If you had known in 1990 that the WWW would be used to spread propaganda and track dissidents, you would have probably liked to delay it till more security and decentralization is built in from the outset. This is a very well-discussed topic in philosophy of science and technology and good sci-fi.
Fermi was probably talking about inevitable things, e.g. if climate is already worsening beyond human limits it's always good to know even if it's too late to do anything. But if knowledge (or our pursuit of it) would lead to new dangers, its perfecly reasonable to (try) to limit knowledge and its spread or pursuit.
The dishonesty of the -ve IQ people behind attitudes like the criticized is that they see danger in everything and use moral panic to enforce views. If the actual "dangers" they are freaking out about are legitimate, they would have been justified to supress (non-violently) science and technology)