By Noah Rothman
Monday, January 27, 2025
Over the weekend, the CIA issued an updated assessment indicating that the agency
now believes, albeit with low confidence, that Covid likely originated in a
Chinese laboratory. That intelligence agency joins the Department of Energy and
the FBI, both of which favor the lab-leak hypothesis.
It wasn’t that long ago that lending credence to that
notion would have branded you a “conspiracy theorist,” and that was gentle treatment. In
accordance with the elite consensus, social media outlets attempted to limit the reach of those who failed to summarily rule out
that prospect. Heterodox voices at scientific institutions were defamed and intimidated by their colleagues. One unnamed whistleblower described by House Republicans as a “highly
credible senior-level CIA officer” alleged that his colleagues who were
amenable to the lab-leak theory were offered “a significant monetary incentive
to change their position.” Too many in the scientific community led a concerted
effort to mislead investigators, like former New York Times science
reporter Donald McNeil, and make them, in his words, a “victim of deception.”
Despite this history, the country responded to the CIA’s
revelations with a gaping yawn. That’s understandable, even if it is
regrettable. Those who knew long ago that the lab-leak theory had too much going
for it to be so easily dismissed are underwhelmed by this late confirmation of
their priors. Others who enforced the omertà around China’s role in the
pandemic don’t want to dwell on their embarrassment. Thus, a conspiracy of
silence has been replaced by a conspiracy of boredom. It should not be so. The unduly
confident arbiters of American public discourse who raked dissenters over the coals — and whose faith in their
own sagacity is matched only by their incuriosity — should be forced to
confront their failures.
The lab leak isn’t the only arena in which the Americans
who postured as enlightened and dispassionate public-health advocates failed
the public. As Jonathan Turley observed over the weekend, the mid-pandemic
status quo governing access to education in the United States was also a
by-product of contagious hysteria.
He cites a new study in the Journal of Infection, which found that “reopening
schools did not change the existing trajectory of COVID-19 rates.” Indeed,
researchers observed “no consistent patterns in cases, hospitalizations, or
deaths despite school re-openings or changes to public health measures.”
That assessment contrasts with the consensus retailed by
educational professionals, their union representatives, and the Democratic
politicians who were beholden to both. “Now,” the New York Times reported in July 2020, “educators are
using some of the same organizing tactics they employed in walkouts over issues
of pay and funding in recent years to demand that schools remain closed.” This
was not the work of an unrepresentative vanguard. A May 2020 poll found that nearly two-thirds of educators
surveyed by EdWeek sought to keep schools closed indefinitely lest they
endanger themselves and their families. A USA Today/Ipsos survey from the same period found that
about 20 percent of teachers would refuse to return if classrooms were reopened
to students.
As late as August 2021, as schools across the country
reluctantly returned to in-person education, mainstream media outlets spearheaded a campaign to create the impression that
schools were a primary vector for Covid transmission. “When we look at the
data, and they say only 0.1% of kids will contract it and get seriously ill and
die, that’s actually around 50,000 children,” National Education Association
president Becky Pringle told ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis. “We have an obligation to make remote
better because until we can really decrease [Covid] community spread throughout
the United States, distance learning and distance working is going to be a fact
of life,” American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten explained in late summer 2020. To ensure
schools remained closed, Weingarten refused to rule out labor action, which she
rebranded “safety strikes.”
Parents of school-age children understood from almost the
moment the country committed their kids to the remote learning social
experiment that it would be a debacle, but they were ignored. They warned that
it would produce suboptimal educational outcomes that would haunt their kids
for years, increase truancy and absenteeism, and undermine their psychological
and social health. They were right.
That’s not all the great unwashed understood intuitively
that somehow eluded the functionaries who set policy during the pandemic. The
dramatic surge in firearms sales during the earliest months of the pandemic suggested that the average
American foresaw the outbreak of violent lawlessness that would result from the
societal upheavals to which the country’s social engineers were committed.
Their prescience was rewarded in the riotous summer of 2020. Likewise, by
September 2021, Americans understood that the inflationary pressure they were
about to endure was attributable — at least in part — to government spending.
“People will continue to pay more money on everyday expenses unless the
government becomes more fiscally responsible,” read a statement with which a
striking 71 percent of self-described independents agreed.
Americans had to be argued out of these conclusions, most
of which were formed from personal experience and common sense. An aggressive
campaign of lobbying, shaming, and moral blackmail was brought to bear against
them. They were victims of a crusade designed to force them to echo the
shibboleths preferred by their self-appointed ombudsmen in the highest echelons
of American society. No one likes to look back critically on pandemics, but we
should not dispense with critical retrospection just because it’s uncomfortable.
Mistakes were made, some of which are more understandable than others. If we
want to avoid repeating them, we should endeavor to learn from them.
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