One by one, the shibboleths that our public-health authorities put forward as reliable guidelines for behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic are being revealed as scientifically baseless health theater. The question is whether anyone will learn from this.

The latest admission is found in the closed-door congressional testimony of former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins, revealed by NR’s own James Lynch. In that testimony, Collins clarified that the origin of Covid — whether the disease emerged zoonotically, perhaps at a meat market, or from research at the Wuhan lab — remains unsettled science and that the lab-leak theory is not a conspiracy theory. Collins also clarified that the guidance for “social distancing” during the pandemic — the recommendation that people from separate households remain six feet apart from one another — had no firm basis in science.

“Do you recall science or evidence that supported the six-feet distance?” the committee asked Collins. “I do not,” he replied. “Have you seen any evidence since then supporting six feet?” they asked. Collins: “No.”

There is a temptation by many to just file the pandemic and its contentious debates away. The imposition of the guidelines and resistance to them tore apart institutions, even families. For those who feel that the contrived consensus of public-health officials robbed them of the chance to spend time with a dying relative, or attend a wedding, or meet a grandchild, there is no just recompense.

But if we give in to this temptation to just move on, and hold no one accountable, and make no reforms, we are doomed in the next pandemic to another ham-fisted response by public-health authorities and an even wilder populist rebellion against them.

The social-distancing guidance was not a small matter. The six-feet-or-more guideline (issued not by Collins, but by the CDC) filtered down through state health departments and became the primary reason for inhibiting business operations and closing schools (some districts took more than a year to open, and more than two to free children from other restrictions that flowed from distancing recommendations). That Collins, who led one of the world’s largest medical-research institutions, cannot recall a single piece of evidence supporting this vastly consequential decision by the CDC is damning to decision-makers in the extreme. Restricting the liberties and marring the settled patterns of life for a nation of over 300 million based on guesses and shrugs is simply unacceptable.

The debate over Covid’s origins is also crucially important and cannot be just waved away as one among dozens of 2020-era controversies. Collins participated in the group call that initiated the infamous “Proximal Origins” paper that was used to demonize the lab-leak hypothesis and broadly censor those who promoted it on social media. Going forward, the national and international policy response to Covid-19 depends entirely on whether this pandemic was due to human error and what type, whether the issue was a lack of safe hygiene standards at meat markets, or whether this was a result of outsourced gain-of-function research conducted at a lab without the highest safety standards, illegally funded by U.S. taxpayers through cut-out organizations.

America’s policy response to Covid was unprecedented. It was also, for many Americans, a demoralizing and depressive time that completely ruined their trust in established authorities. Congress must keep up the oversight effort and hold bad actors accountable. That may include embarrassing them, as they tried to embarrass and shame Americans who defied the guidelines they set, without evidence or justification.