How and why we lost confidence in the public health system

"In the end, it took some grandstanding Republicans in Congress to break the logjam of information. In July 2023, the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a trove of emails, text messages, and other interactions between Fauci, Collins, other health officials, and leading virus experts. Other messages were leaked to independent reporters, including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger. These communications reveal a stunning contrast between those experts’ confident public statements and the doubts and fears they expressed privately.

In dozens of interviews, dating to the start of the pandemic, Fauci, Collins, and others expressed bland assurances that the new virus must have spilled into the human population from a wild animal. The idea that the Wuhan Institute might have been involved was dismissed as “just a conspiracy theory,” in Fauci’s words. But the recently disclosed communications reveal that behind the scenes, many of the world’s top virologists worried that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had leaked from the Wuhan lab. Worse, some feared that its terrifying transmissibility might be due to genetic manipulation."

The Covid Cover-up | City Journal (city-journal.org)