When Not to Trust the Experts: Now is the time to wake up, and to stop "trusting the experts" in the same naïve way we have been doing it

Gain-of-function research should continue. Such is the opinion of the Biden White House, as explained in this press conference at the end of February. It is "important to help prevent future pandemics," says communications man John Kirby.

Last fall, researchers in Boston went public about creating new variants of COVID-19, while in a recent letter, over 150 prominent virologists joined together to air their concerns that new regulations might "overly restrict the ability of scientists to generate the knowledge needed to protect ourselves from these pathogens."

By now, most serious people are in agreement that the 2019 coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan. Even federal agencies like the FBI are falling into line. The evidence for what happened is overwhelming.

To begin with, the bats that host the virus's nearest relatives don't live near Wuhan itself, but 1,100 miles away, along the border between China and Laos, in just the place where the Wuhan researchers repeatedly went to collect wild bat viruses for their gain-of-function experiments. Then include the fact that, shortly after the first outbreak, the Chinese authorities deleted their viral genome archives. Why do that if you don't have something to hide? And we shouldn't forget about China's dismal lab safety protocols. And so forth.

For the first year after COVID appeared, mainstream outlets like CNN and Twitter censored these things for political reasons. After President Trump left office, the taboo was relaxed, and now even mainstream opinion is coalescing around the lab leak theory.

China, obviously, doesn't come away looking good, but the United States isn't off the hook, either.

It was the U.S. government that funded this research, and the only reason that Chinese scientists were doing it in the first place was because so many American scientists — whom the Chinese see as their superiors — had devoted their careers to making gain-of-function research look necessary, important, and safe.

How do people in the pure and applied sciences advance their careers? By doing the things that the higher-ups consider necessary, important, and safe.

And when a lot of high-status people have clustered around a set of prestigious ideas, it's rare for anything as mundane as evidence or results to break the prestige of those ideas. Hence the fact that, even after three years of COVID, nearly all of the leading authorities on gain-of-function research are still in favor of gain-of-function research.

In the kind of country that America once was, it would be a surprise if a man like Anthony Fauci were able to escape impeachment for repeatedly lying to Congress about this research and his own role in promoting and funding it.

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