Why Did They Lie

Back in 2020 when the COVID pandemic was beginning, a “tight network of elite scientists soon engaged in a remarkably effective effort to deceive the world. They collectively briefed the U.S. government, World Health Organization, and any media outlets that would listen: The science was settled, this wasn’t a lab leak. Some of them went on to publish the now-infamous Proximal Origins paper in March 2020 in Nature Medicine, ranked as the most impactful science article of that year. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” the paper’s authors asserted.”

But now we have a much better understanding, not only of how COVID got loose but also why its origin was hidden.

“It was always a lie; one of the most consequential lies of the 21^st century. Like all great lies it perfectly inverted the truth: the evidence supporting natural spillover has always been thin. Conversely, the evidence pointing to a lab leak has always been compelling and has grown substantially more persuasive with time.”

And the quoted article concludes that the lies were made for four different reasons:

1. One group of scientists who lied were direct collaborators with Wuhan in their bat virus gain of function experiments and therefore were directly responsible for the COVID outbreak.  They lied to avoid culpability in this enormous disaster.
2. A second group of scientists weren’t linked to the Wuhan lab but had strongly supported the idea that gain of function research was safe and therefore would be seen as partially responsible for the risky research that gave rise to COVID.  Also if COVID’s origin is pinned to gain of function research then these researchers would be deprived of this experimental practice for safety reasons.
3. A third group had financial and reputational incentives provided by Anthony Fauci in the form of grants for research.  They sold their reputations for research dollars.
4. And the fourth group was anybody who absolutely refused to say it was a lab leak because Donald Trump said it was.  They hated Trump so much that they would swear that the core of the sun is cold if Trump said it was hot.

In a just world, people in the first three groups should go to prison for lying about the origin of a disaster that had such horrific economic impact.  The fourth group should be mocked incessantly and any of them in the media industry should lose their jobs.

But this isn’t a just world.  It’s just the world.