Now That We (All But) Know* Covid-19 Escaped During Gain-of-Function Testing in a Wuhan Lab...

... can we expect those who advanced "shortcut to morality" theories for personal gain and/or engaged in cover-up to take responsibility for the harms perpetrated?

*Update: An extremely reliable and knowledgeable source told me he believes Covid-19 almost certainly came from the wet market. Story developing! At least for me. Stay turned here and please subscribe!

‘Tis the season of a spate of books being published about how so many people got COVID wrong. These include David Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. If you have a taste for getting completely worked up about how misled the American people were by various sectors tasked with keeping us safe, do read Zweig’s Substack post of today. A clip (and a link):

What was not revealed to the American public is that Deborah Birx, the head of the White House coronavirus task force, knew 15 days was a ruse. Birx admits in her book, Silent Invasion, that in one of her meetings where “15 Days” was being pitched, that she “left the rest unstated: that this was just a starting point.” She goes on:

No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that.

Birx fashioned herself quite the manipulator and boasts of the “chess” moves she made, changing tactics for the goals she wanted to achieve as she presented various cases to the vice president, members of his staff, and, ultimately, the president. At one point she describes her pitch of a travel ban as yet “one brick in the construction of a larger wall” of measures she planned to push for. But, she said, “I couldn’t do anything that would reveal my true intention.”

The Uncomfortable Truth Behind "15 Days to Slow the Spread"- 5 Years Ago Today

Who else did the misleading? Where shall I begin…

“A former New York Times journalist has attacked a group of leading scientists for “clearly” misleading him over the Covid lab-leak theory in the early days of the pandemic.

“Donald McNeil Jr said he became sceptical of the hypothesis the virus was engineered in a Wuhan lab after several top epidemiological virologists insisted it wasn’t possible.

“Mr McNeil Jr said their efforts to throw him “off track” influenced the newspaper’s coverage of the theory and likely contributed to the topic being ‘dropped’ for a year….”

— “Senior US journalist attacks leading scientists for ‘misleading’ him over Covid lab-leak theory,” by Susie Coen (Yahoo News)

Lest we forget - and I never will - that when Times science reporter McNeil floated the lab leak theory in 2020, he was drummed out by activist employees who knew accusations of racism as the au courant go-to, "screw pursuing the truth, we'll get ours now.” This seemed patently obvious (and horrifying) to many of us, and I literally wrote myself hoarse at the time penning a piece for Newsweek.

“The New York Times Succumbed to Another Mob. Journalism Is Unrecognizable” came out on February 8, 2021. I could in no way see how the Times getting rid of its top Covid-19 reporter, whom they’d just put up for a Pulitzer, benefitted the public good. Instead I saw a small group inside the paper ready to climb the ladder via accusations of racism - what Matt Welch calls “a shortcut to morality” - the truth of Covid-19’s origins be damned. The public destruction of a man’s career and reputation would be fall out enough. It was not. Bad information would need to be amplified in order to validate the accusation, which is how we got a Times reporter on the Covid-19 beat post-McNeil tweeting on March 26…