To be fair, Derek Thompson is not alone in asking the wrong questions following a series of revelations about COVID-19 — its origin and its mitigation. Thompson does, however, come closest to connecting the dots in his essay, “Why are we still arguing about masks?”

Over the past two weeks or so, we have seen the media-government narratives on COVID-19 shaken:

• The Lancet meta-analysis of scores of studies on naturally acquired immunity called into serious question the case for broad immunization
• The WSJ revealed the US intel assessment that a lab leak looks like the most likely origin of COVID-19, which the FBI had concluded by June 2021
• And the Cochrane meta-analysis of nearly 80 studies around the world showed that mask mandates do not, in fact, impact community transmission at all

The question Thompson asks is the wrong one. But in his conclusion, Thompson sidles up to the right answer, even with the wrong question:

My advice in navigating this mess is: Do not trust people who, in their handling of complex questions with imperfect data, manufacture simplistic answers with perfect confidence. Instead, trust people who allow for complexity and uncertainty. Trust people who change their mind when the evidence changes. Trust people who, when they say “Believe the science!” put their trust in science, with a small-s, which is the dynamic reevaluation of complicated truths, rather than SCIENCE, in weird caps-lock font, which has come to mean the faith that for every random political position, there exists an official-looking study to permanently justify it. I wish the field of epidemiology was made up of immutable laws as settled as the roundness of the Earth and the power of gravity. It’s not. Its priors are vulnerable to reevaluation. If you want to stay right in this space, you have to be curious enough to potentially prove yourself wrong. You have to keep paying attention. For better or worse, that’s science.

And this leads us to the right questions, which are these:

• Why were we prevented from arguing about masks in the first place, on social media and elsewhere, in part by government agencies like the CDC?
• Why were questions about mask mandates — government policies — shut down and marginalized as “denialism”?
• Why did these same elites try to paint people asking about naturally acquired immunity — a well-known biological reality — as the pandemic version of flat-earthers?
• Why did media and government paint people as racists for arguing that a novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan might not be coincidental to the lab in Wuhan that was conducting gain-of-function research on novel coronaviruses?

The answer to that last question may be the easiest. As I have written earlier this week, the conclusion that COVID-19 leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology sets up an accountability tree that threatened those in power during the pandemic. NIH chief Francis Collins reversed the previous ban on gain-of-function (GOF) research on pathogens over the prophetic warnings against it from the Cambridge Working Group. That decision by Collins in December 2017 allowed funding to flow through the NIH and NIAID headed by Anthony Fauci to groups like the Eco Health Alliance, which funded the Wuhan lab — even while the State Department warned the next year that their Level 4 biosafety practices were “sloppy,” and also predicted disaster as the Cambridge Working Group had in 2014.

Plus, the same people had largely concluded that the disaster had struck. Emphasis mine:

Knowing the significance of the Wuhan virologists’ discovery, and knowing that the WIV’s top-level biosafety laboratory (BSL-4) was relatively new, the U.S. Embassy health and science officials in Beijing decided to go to Wuhan and check it out. In total, the embassy sent three teams of experts in late 2017 and early 2018 to meet with the WIV scientists, among them Shi Zhengli, often referred to as the “bat woman” because of her extensive experience studying coronaviruses found in bats.

When they sat down with the scientists at the WIV, the American diplomats were shocked by what they heard. The Chinese researchers told them they didn’t have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL-4 lab. The Wuhan scientists were asking for more support to get the lab up to top standards.

The diplomats wrote two cables to Washington reporting on their visits to the Wuhan lab. More should be done to help the lab meet top safety standards, they said, and they urged Washington to get on it. They also warned that the WIV researchers had found new bat coronaviruses could easily infect human cells, and which used the same cellular route that had been used by the original SARS coronavirus. …

After receiving the cables from a source, I called around to get reactions from other American officials I trusted. What I found was that, just months into the pandemic, a large swath of the government already believed the virus had escaped from the WIV lab, rather than having leaped from an animal to a human at the Wuhan seafood market or some other random natural setting, as the Chinese government had claimed.

Any theory of the pandemic’s origins had to account for the fact that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus—or, by its official name, SARS-CoV-2—first appeared in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the lab that possessed one of the world’s largest collections of bat coronaviruses and that possessed the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, a virus known as RaTG13 that Shi identified in her lab.

Josh Rogin’s report came out in March 2021 at Politico, almost exactly two years ago, as an excerpt from his book Chaos Under Heaven. The FBI quietly made that their official assessment three months later. And yet for another two years, the people who made those choices avoided accountability for them, and were protected by news organizations, social-media platforms, and the government’s law enforcement and scientific bureaus by suppressing any questions about it.

The government and the media establishment weren’t interested in science. They were interested in compliance. And they imposed on us exactly what Thompson correctly identifies as an anti-science regime in which priors are never re-evaluated, conclusions never questioned, and the higher functionaries are protected from any criticism or dissent. That isn’t science; it’s a religious cult with white lab coats. And all of these institutions that are supposed to serve the people turned into its enforcement arm instead, a mass of corruption that the media still won’t address. The New York Times, for instance, still has not written a news report on the Cochrane meta-study. Its only mention came in Bret Stephens’ column.

That prompts the real question: when will the media and government get deprogrammed from this religious cult? And the answer is … don’t hold your breath, masked or not.