Throughout the COVID lockdown, Dr. Anthony Fauci and his associates at the National Institute of Health, in the name of science, dictated how we were to conduct our lives.

Their public utterances were infallible and had to be accepted ex cathedra.

Members of the medical profession who dared to disagree with a Fauci diagnosis or interpretation of data were publicly shamed as cranks spreading disinformation. They were excommunicated from the fellowship of scientists because they were incorrigible sinners.

The term “science” means experiment and observation. It is concerned with the nature of things, not in its abstract form, but in its observable and material appearance. Conclusions reached by scientists after analyzing accumulated data are always contingent. In other words, a scientist interpreting data cannot lay claim to the absolute certitude of his conclusions. The most scientists can say is “as far as we know….”

But during COVID, Fauci spoke in absolute terms when imposing restrictions on Americans.

However, with COVID behind us, the truth about the crisis is finally coming out, and those findings are dimming the aura that has surrounded Dr. Fauci.

On Sunday, June 9, The New York Times ran two major pieces under the umbrella title “Can we finally have an honest conversation about COVID?” It is fascinating reading but received little attention from the mainstream media.

Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at Harvard and MIT, writes in her piece “Why COVID Probably Started In a Lab” that “although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence—gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government—suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.”

Dr. Chan’s lengthy analysis points out that at the “Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade … [and] the year before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS-CoV-2’s defining feature.”

She adds that “the Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS-CoV-2.”

The doctor concludes “the hypothesis that COVID-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.”

Dr. Chan asks for a “credible investigation [that] would deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic.” And she calls on Dr. Fauci to cooperate with the investigation.

Sadly, despite all the evidence, the New York Post has reported that Dr. Fauci, in his forthcoming “tell all” memoir, continues to insist that talk about a lab leak in Wuhan is a conspiracy theory that generated smear campaigns.

In the companion essay, Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci concedes that “big chunks of the history of the Covid pandemic were rewritten over the last month or so in a way that will have terrible consequences for many years to come.”

Under questioning of Dr. Fauci, at a congressional subcommittee hearing Americans learned “that some key parts of the public health guidance…during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, were not backed up by solid science. What’s more, inconvenient information was kept from the public suppressed, denied or disparaged as crackpot nonsense.”

Studies did not support the six-foot apart mandate, or that the virus was spread by droplets, or that schools and businesses had to be closed. “Officials did not just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them.”

And then there was the cover-up. A senior National Health Institute doctor, for example, deleted emails to avoid public oversight.

“Delays, falsehoods, and misrepresentations,” Tufekci concludes, “had terrible real-time effects on the lives of Americans.”

As for the long-term impact: “Public Health officials squandered our faith in them for not being transparent.”

Pretty powerful stuff for the left-wing Times.

To begin the long road of redemption, Dr. Fauci and his confreres should confess they are not omniscient and God-like, ask for forgiveness, and publicly proclaim “mea culpa, mea maximus culpa”—”through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”