RUTHFULLY YOURS

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 Thus, a conspiracy of silence has been replaced by a conspiracy of boredom.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.