Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, seemed to be leveling harsh criticism at the health community. “Under questioning by a congressional subcommittee, top officials from the National Institutes of Health, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, acknowledged that some key parts of the public health guidance their agencies promoted during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic were not backed up by solid science,” she wrote. “What’s more, inconvenient information was kept from the public — suppressed, denied or disparaged as crackpot nonsense…Officials didn’t just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them…Dr. David Morens, a senior N.I.H. figure, was deleting emails that discussed pandemic origins and using his personal account so as to avoid public oversight. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote to the head of a nonprofit involved in research at the Wuhan lab.”

Her condemnation appeared uncompromising: “I wish I could say these were all just examples of the science evolving in real time, but they actually demonstrate obstinacy, arrogance and cowardice. Instead of circling the wagons, these officials should have been responsibly and transparently informing the public to the best of their knowledge and abilities. Their delays, falsehoods and misrepresentations had terrible real-time effects on the lives of Americans. Failure to acknowledge the basic facts of Covid transmission led the authorities to pointlessly close beaches and parks, leaving city dwellers to huddle in the much more dangerous confines of cramped and poorly ventilated apartments. The same failure also delayed the opening of schools and caused untold millions of dollars to be wasted.”

Her damning verdict: “The most severe ramifications of these failures may last for decades, because they gave people cause to doubt the word of scientific and public health authorities. If the government misled people about how Covid is transmitted, why would Americans believe what it says about vaccines or bird flu or H.I.V.? How should people distinguish between wild conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies?”

True. Some other analysts <cough!> were saying all of this while it was going on. But her seemingly bold essay just proves that the experts are still “circling the wagons,” including Tufekci. What has been—correctly—most frequently cited as the moment the public health community forfeited public trust was when its members announced that while beaches were closing and churches were told that they couldn’t hold graveside funerals, mass George Floyd Freakout demonstrations were just fine because “racial injustice is also a public health issue.”

This was, as any non-woke, objective observer instantly realized, all the evidence necessary to conclude that the scientists spouting their fake nostrums were as more motivated by politics and virtue-signaling than concern for the best interests of the public. And, tellingly, here is another expert piously purporting to explain the essential nature of trust for public institutions to function properly who shows—while doing so!— that she lacks the integrity, honesty and courage to justify trust in her own expert pronouncements. She won’t risk angering those crucial constituents of her own cult, those indignant DEI beneficiaries, the progressives of color (of which she is one). Black Lives Matter riots? What Black Lives Matter riots?

There’s more hypocrisy and selective withholding of crucial information here as well. The New York Times has some nerve publishing this while remaining silent regarding its own complicity in weaponizing fake science during the pandemic, as well as fake death mortality statistics. Its assigned task was to terrify the public into accepting whatever the “experts” spouted as fact and bowing to whatever restrictions of their rights would-be dictators like Gretchen Whitmer decided to impose for “the greater good.” (I resolved to end my print subscription to the Times when it started putting red Wuhan death spikes on the front page extending over the mast head.)

Finally a pop quiz: What’s missing from this section: “If the government misled people about how Covid is transmitted, why would Americans believe what it says about vaccines or bird flu or H.I.V.?”

No mention of climate change? I’m sure it’s just an oversight…