Last Thursday, The Wall Street Journal exposed how federal agencies helped carry out the biggest scientific con of the century. In early 2020, when the COVID pandemic was starting to ravage America, federal bureaucrats and politicians rushed to suppress any suggestion that the pandemic originated from a Chinese government lab bankrolled by U.S. government agencies.

Key officials in Joe Biden’s administration effectively exonerated the Chinese government even though the Chinese completely stonewalled any outside investigation into the origin of the COVID virus.

The FBI’s top expert concluded that the virus leaked from the lab but he was siderailed by the Biden administration, blocked from presenting his evidence at a key White House meeting in August 2021. Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, concluded that COVID leaked from a lab but they were muzzled. The Inspector General is conducting an investigation to determine why those experts were silenced. The Department of Energy also concluded that COVID originated in a lab. In September 2023, a senior CIA analyst told a congressional committee that six key CIA analysts had been bribed by the agency to abandon their conclusion that COVID originated in a lab leak.

The Chinese government first admitted that a pandemic had broken out in the city of Wuhan in early 2020. Though the Chinese military-affiliated Wuhan Institute of Virology had been experimenting with bats for years, the Chinese government insisted the new virus came from a nearby marketplace. But the lead scientists involved with bat research had all been struck down by COVID-19 symptoms shortly before the Chinese government denied any responsibility.

The outbreak of COVID-19 spurred one of the most brazen coverups in modern U.S. history. The National Institute for Health had been financing gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That type of research seeks to genetically alter organisms to enable the spread of viruses into new species. Such research is extremely dangerous; as MIT professor Kevin Esvelt asked in 2021, “Why is anyone trying to teach the world how to make viruses that could kill millions of people?” The risks were compounded because the Wuhan Institute had a very poor safety rating. Two years earlier, the State Department confidentially “warned other federal agencies about safety issues at Wuhan labs studying bat COVID,” but the public disclosure of that alert was delayed until 2022.

In January 2020, top federal scientists recognized that the pandemic could obliterate their reputations. Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes for Health, wrote in an email that “a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.” The “conspiracy” was the facts of the matter.

Anthony Fauci, the chief of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), speedily enlisted a handful of trusted scientists to gin up a paper supposedly “proving” that the virus could not have originated in the lab. A top NIAID scientist accepted the task of debunking the lab leak story because, as he emailed a colleague, “Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories.” The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals in the world, enlisted in the coverup with an op-ed by twenty-seven scientists who proclaimed, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Maybe the same scientists also sent an addendum to NIH: Keep giving us grant money or your reputation will “swim with the fishes.”

Further “proof” was provided by a torrent of accusations of racism against anyone who publicly suggested that the virus originated in a Chinese lab. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center added a federal fist to the debate, pressuring Twitter to suppress hundreds of thousands of accounts (including thousands of average Americans) in early 2020 for the crime of suggesting that COVID originated in a lab.

The virus that NIH financed provided push button dictatorial power to politicians at every level of government. In the name of saving lives, politicians entitled themselves to destroy an unlimited number of livelihoods. Most governors responded to COVID-19 by dropping the equivalent of a reverse neutron bomb—something which destroys the economy while leaving human beings unharmed. But the only way to assume people were uninjured was to presume their lives were totally detached from their jobs, bank accounts, mortgage and rent payments, and friends and family.

A virus with a 99+% survival rate spawned a 100% presumption in favor of despotism. From the start of the pandemic, many people who swore allegiance to “science and data” also believed that absolute power would keep them safe. Doubters became dissidents who deserved to be covertly silenced.

Shutdown advocates appealed to science like righteous priests invoking God and the Bible to sanctify scourging enemies. But the “science” was often farcically unreliable. Mandatory mask mandates became the new version of the Emancipation Proclamation. Fauci and other top officials deceived Americans into believing that cloth masks offered far more protection than they delivered. Do Americans finally recognize that the federal government was the biggest source of disinformation during the pandemic?

A century ago, historian Henry Adams declared that politics has “always been the systematic organizations of hatreds.” COVID-19 policies were so disruptive in part because politicians intentionally sought to maximize fear and rage against anyone who refused to submit to any dictate. After the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines collapsed, Joe Biden responded by dictating that a hundred million American adults must get injected based on his personal decree. A few weeks later on a CNN town hall, Biden derided vaccine skeptics as murderers who only wanted “the freedom to kill you” with COVID. A few months later, a Rasmussen poll found that 59% of Democratic voters favored house arrest for the unvaccinated, and 45% favored locking the unvaxxed into government detention facilities. Almost half of Democrats favored empowering government to “fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.” But hatred proved to be as ineffective as the Pfizer vaccine when it came to fighting COVID-19.

Fauci, who was also Biden’s chief medical advisor, justified COVID mandates because average citizens “don’t have the ability” to determine what is best for them. But congressional investigations revealed that Fauci was at the center of string-pulling to shirk responsibility for the Wuhan debacle. After Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) suggested prosecuting Fauci for false testimony on bankrolling “gain-of-function” research, Fauci howled that his critics are “really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” But not nearly as dangerous as vesting vast power in secretive federal agencies

If COVID-19 had been initially recognized as the result of one of the biggest U.S. government boondoggles in history, politicians never could have pirouetted as saviors as they seized sway over daily life. Instead of Tony Fauci bobbleheads, perhaps there would have been the slogan “Your Government at Work” superimposed atop a million American caskets. But will any politician or government-funded scientist ever be held responsible for the carnage that was unleashed?