In five years, Jay Bhattacharya has gone from a prominent critic of the public health establishment’s reaction to Covid-19 to director of the National Institutes of Health, one of the pillars of that very establishment. Yet some of his employees insist on living in the past.

During a Monday town-hall-style address at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., Bhattacharya told a crowded auditorium that “it’s possible that the pandemic was caused by research conducted by human beings, and it’s also possible that the NIH partly sponsored that research.” Public health leaders, including Francis Collins, a predecessor of Bhattacharya’s at NIH, had worked strenuously to suppress and delegitimize any speculation that Covid-19 may have emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

Hearing a version of that view, one which raised the possibility that NIH may itself have been to blame, was too much for some of those assembled at NIH earlier this week. Never mind the plausibility of the contention. Simply hearing it caused several dozen of them, many wearing face masks, to walk out of the meeting. Bhattacharya said to them on their way out, “It’s nice to have free speech. You’re welcome, you guys.”

A lot has changed in five years, as any reflection on what was going on around this time in 2020 would tell you. Views about Covid deemed unacceptable then are commonplace now. Some of the Covid dissenters are now some of the public health establishment’s leaders. The leftist political theater that began to consume society around this time five years ago may not have gone away entirely. But it looks increasingly pathetic. The NIH employee walkout is an artifact of a different time, and not just because some of those who walked out were wearing masks.