Over the weekend the New York Times published a piece by columnist Zeynep Tufekci, whose writing and reporting during the Covid Era vaulted her to public prominence. The title — complete with the passive voice — says it all: “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.” She is referring to Covid-19, of course, and specifically to its origins: It is now near-certain that Covid originated, not from some unfortunate pangolin or cave bat in a “wet market” in Wuhan, but rather from the BSL-4 lab researching deadly infectious diseases down the street — as all but the politically motivated and/or brain-dead immediately suspected back in 2020.

That’s not the story. The story — and again, it is one that Covid skeptics had read about long ago — is that the American scientific community actively conspired to lie about Covid’s origins. Despite many if not most of them privately believing that Covid had likely been leaked by incompetent Chinese researchers, the epidemiological community — from Anthony Fauci on down to the hundreds of scientists and researchers working on coronaviruses — closed ranks to suppress knowledge of this fact.

Nature Medicine, one of America’s most respected scientific research journals, published a banner piece declaring the “lab leak” theory impossible. We now know, through internal communications among the authors, that they did not actually believe this themselves. (Some in fact wrote internally that they believed lab leak to be by far the most plausible origin.) Instead, Anthony Fauci and the WHO’s Jeremy Farrar secretly guided the drafting of the piece and insisted the researchers declare the lab-leak theory “lacking plausibility.” (The researchers, indifferent to truth or their ethical responsibilities as scientists, happily complied.)

Cries of racism immediately took over from there — to accuse the Chinese of unleashing this monstrous plague upon the world was racist, would only upset international relations, and might also help Trump get reelected — so for the next year or so suggesting out loud that the Chinese Communist Party foolishly manufactured and idiotically released Covid to the world was akin to burning a cross in public.

Ah, but now it can told. Yes, now that it’s all safely over, it can finally be revealed that every authority in America lied to you and nobody can be trusted ever again. What a wonderful, heartening conclusion to draw from American civilization’s encounter with the pandemic! I don’t want to pick specifically on Tufekci — her reporting about Covid was a good deal better than most in the mainstream media, or even at her own newspaper for that matter, and it’s good to see a piece so directly accusing our esteemed scientific authorities of openly lying to us for cynical political reasons. But it is impossible not feel a sense of disgust welling up within me, disgust not with her but with the intellectual climate which only made it possible for her to write this piece now, five years after it was too late to do any good.

My mind instead immediately turns to the slew of “now the truth about Joe Biden’s dementia can be told” pieces that came out only after his replacement Kamala Harris had lost the election. Our media betters had been sitting on those stories for nearly four years at that point, and expected us to be grateful when they finally admitted what we, the voters, had figured out long ago: Biden was senile, had been for quite some time, and nearly everybody in the Washington and New York media was in on an unspoken conspiracy to conceal it “because Trump.” They didn’t write these stories while Biden was still campaigning. They didn’t even write them while Harris was campaigning, for fear that questions about her complicity in hiding Biden’s decay would derail her chances. Only after she lost, and Democratic electoral fortunes could no longer be affected, was it now time to peel back the curtain for us peons — who, as I again emphasized, had figured this all out long ago without their help.

News delivered too late to matter is functionally little better than history.