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By Zeynep Tufekci
Opinion columnist
Much of the history of the Covid pandemic has been rewritten in the last month, something that will have terrible consequences for many years to come.
Questioned through a congressional subcommittee, senior officials from the National Institutes of Health, as well as Dr. Anthony Fauci, claimed that some key elements of the public fitness guidance promoted through their agencies during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not safeguarded. through a falsified science. In addition, inconvenient data has been withheld from the public: suppressed, denied, or denigrated as wild nonsense.
Remember the rule that we all have to stay at least six feet apart?”It’s something that came up here,” Fauci said in an initial interview for the subcommittee hearing, adding that he was “not aware of any studies” to back up. During his recent public hearing, he stated that, on the contrary, the virus is transmitted through the air.
As for the repeated claim that Covid originated in a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, and an infectious disease laboratory there, the N. I. H. Privately, officials were concerned about that lab’s lax biosecurity practices and risky research. In his public testimony, Fauci claimed that even today “there has been no definitive evidence one way or the other” of the origins of Covid-19.
The government not only spread these dubious ideas, but also humiliated anyone who dared to question them. ” Dr. Fauci throws cold water on the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab,” was a typical headline. During the hearings, it came to light that Dr. David Morens, a senior NIH official, deleted emails about the origins of the pandemic and used his private account to avoid public surveillance. “We are all wise enough to know that you never have irrefutable proof, and if we did, we would not include it in our emails, and if we did find out, we would remove it,” he wrote to the director of a nonprofit involved in the research at the Wuhan lab.
I would simply like to say that those are just examples of how science is evolving in real time, but they demonstrate stubbornness, arrogance, and cowardice. Instead of hanging around, those officials deserve to have informed the public in a culpable and transparent manner. to the best of his wisdom and capacity.
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