JIM MEIGS: The Fauci Covid Conspiracy. “We told you so. There’s probably a more polite way to say that, but who cares? We are long past the time for politeness regarding the derelictions of our leadership class when it came to Covid-19. The American public has every reason to be angry. And the small, maligned group of scientists, journalists, and political figures who challenged the wisdom of America’s designated Covid experts deserves an apology. . . . In the absence of hard data, a little overreach on the part of experts might have been forgivable, at least at first. As the pandemic ground on, however, scientists started learning more about the disease, including insights that could help slow transmission and that undermined the case for rigid lockdowns. But the Covid gatekeepers mostly ignored any data that challenged their initial recommendations. They never admitted a mistake and rarely changed course on policy. And when it came to the mystery of Covid’s origin, the scientific community instantly closed ranks. The idea that a bat-related coronavirus might have emerged from a Wuhan China lab devoted to studying bat-related coronaviruses was deemed a far-out right-wing fantasy. In other words, our public health officials, abetted by a politicized media, manufactured an airtight consensus on both Covid science and policy. This consensus was largely immune to scientific evidence or concerns about the real-world impacts of draconian policies.”
Plus: “It takes a lot to shock me, but, after following the lab-leak debate for four years, I continue to be stunned by the duplicity of Anthony Fauci and other leading health officials on this issue. I’ve written column after column about how Fauci and his nominal boss, National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins, joined several key virus researchers in scrambling to distract Congress, the press, and the public from questions about their long-standing links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Indeed, long before most American conservatives had even heard the term ‘lab leak,’ Fauci was denouncing the idea as a nutty conspiracy theory. Today we know there was a conspiracy. But it had nothing to do with a few dissident scientists and journalists asking questions about the origin of the virus. The conspiracy was orchestrated by Fauci and his closest aides. Thanks to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and other reporting, we can now see how Fauci strong-armed his fellow scientists to embrace a false consensus on the lab leak. (According to emails later released, even some of the scientists whom Fauci pushed to write the famous 2020 ‘Proximal Origin’ article—which claimed to disprove the lab-leak hypothesis—had doubts about their own paper’s conclusions.) Fauci and his team went on to conceal public records, bamboozle reporters, mislead Congress, and lean on social-media outlets to suppress inconvenient stories—all to cover up their possible complicity in the creation of Covid.”
And none of them has been prosecuted, or even tarred and feathered.
