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.
The word “expert” comes from two roots:
“ex”—a has-been
“spurt”—a stream of urine