The full COVID story: an education in contemporary medicine and science and the fallibility of experts and institutions
We must remember our history in order not to repeat our blunders; but to remember it, we must first know it. Unfortunately the recent histories of science and medicine are not well nor widely known. (A fine overview of global history of economics, politics, and social matters is Paul Johnson’s Modern Times [1]).
When the COVID pandemic first became news, the conventional explanation was that the virus had somehow jumped to a human being from something in the wholesale seafood market in Wuhan, China. The notion that it might have escaped accidentally from a laboratory in the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology was widely and officially described as a conspiracy theory lacking supporting evidence.
It is now known with something like certainty, however, not only that the virus did originate in that lab, but that the virus had also been deliberately engineered to make it more infectious to human beings.
That had been done as part of “gain-of-function” research intended to provide information possibly helpful for creating treatments if a similar pathogen evolves in the wild; or perhaps for devising counter-measures in case some “bad actors” seek to use viruses in biological warfare. A research proposal had in fact described possible experiments for specific genetic engineering to introduce features that make the virus more infectious; features that are in fact present in COVID-19.
A leading researcher was Professor Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, in collaboration with researchers at the Wuhan Institute. Funding came from the National Institutes of Health, sponsored by Francis Collins, NIH director, and Anthony Fauci, Director of NIH’s Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases.
Early in the pandemic, several articles were published that discounted the possibility of a laboratory origin; prominent virologists including Baric and people connected with NIH had initiated or sponsored these articles.
This deplorable, scandalous, situation has now been recounted in lengthy detail [1a]. Leading institutions and medical researchers in the USA created the unusually infectious and pathogenic coronavirus which caused the global pandemic after accidentally escaping from laboratory, and those institutions and individuals tried to cover their footprints and convince everyone that the lab was not the source of the virus.
Self-interested researchers lobbied the political powers to allow them to continue “gain-of-function” research despite the obvious risks, without specific foreseeable benefit other than the usual shibboleth of advancing science and gaining knowledge. Those researcher-lobbyists included NIH’s Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci.
The clear lesson is that official statements about medicine and science cannot be trusted; and that the mass media as well as many commentators and pundits cannot be relied on to unmask lies from the official authorities. The detailed unmasking of the cover-up cited here [1a] is dated 28 April 2026. However, a newsletter from the White House had exposed the same information already a year earlier [2]; as had the Report of the House Oversight Committee [3] six months before that.
Yet I had not learned of these even though the topic is of high interest for me. Not only cannot we trust official sources about such things as the origin of a pandemic-causing virus, even long afterwards the mass media remain in the bubble of earlier deliberate official misinformation, to the degree that detailed admissions from government sources are not given the intense exposure that would seem called for.
It may appear incredible that soon after the detailed publications by the White House and the earlier House Report, the World Health Organization (WHO) should continue to deny the truth, but that is the case: “the weight of available evidence…suggests zoonotic spillover…either directly from bats or through an intermediate host” [4]; and an editorial in the Journal of Korean Medical Science [5] seconded WHO and also tried to discount the details and conclusions published by the White House.
It is well past time that the conventional wisdom — the understandings among the media, the general public, and particularly policy-makers — should recognize that official, “authoritative” statements about medicine and science cannot be relied on any more than can official, “authoritative” statements about politics, or about economics, or about such social matters as race relations or economic inequalities.
Instead, contemporary opinion continues to reflect an outdated view of “science” as objectively reality-based. The achievements of science and advances in technology, since the 15th-18th “Scientific Revolution” and “Enlightenment” had brought increasing general trust in the authoritative voices in those domains. The atom-bomb project and many other technical advances during World War II accelerated that long trend. The media, journalists, science writers as well as medical practitioners acquired the same habits of relying without question on such authoritative voices as the Director of the National Institute of Health or one of its Institutes or, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
But scientists, engineers, technologists, doctors, are the same human beings as anyone else, and are no less fallible; they are equally prone to prejudices, subject to conflict of interest, influenced by Groupthink, tempted in innumerable ways and liable sometimes to submit to temptation. Yet completely misleading material — for example, the concept of “the scientific method” — continues to be taught in schools and colleges, about the possibility of eliciting reliable knowledge from the words of authoritative “scientific” experts.
Nothing about what happened during COVID is illuminated by an “the scientific method”. Nothing about the behavior of scientists or doctors or engineers or anyone else is illuminated by “the scientific method”. As David Goodstein wrote in a book review in Science magazine [6], everyone who had not yet learned that the scientific method is a myth should read Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method [7]. A more recent and more comprehensive description of the nature as well as history of science is Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed [8].
The fully exposed COVID story, of a laboratory-made virus and the attempt to cover that up, illustrates the hubris that tends to infect experts in any field, the illusion that since they understand the topic better than others, therefore they are also better equipped to make decisions not only internal to that special technical field but also about its applications, including judgments as to possible consequences for society at large. Ralph Baric, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and many others decided that the possible advances in understanding to be achieved by gain-of function-research with viruses outweighed any risks of harm, as they typically believed themselves expert enough not to make mistakes or experience laboratory accidents.
This episode might also serve to remind of the distinction that used to be quite commonly made long ago between hard and soft sciences, as when medical experts appear to think of themselves as scientists [9].
Also illustrated in the behavior of Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci is the inevitable conflict of interest between telling the truth and safeguarding the status of official institutions for which one is responsible. Institutions and organizations of any kind try to avoid having to admit that they ever make mistakes of even a quite minor nature.
That COVID-19 was man-made, and that the experts allowed it to escape from a lab, is a very important lesson to be learned globally. Another equally important lesson is that much about what happened during COVID reflects an earlier blunder of taking HIV as the cause of AIDS. (For the evidence that it was a blunder, see my index of the pertinent literature [10]). The chief COVID advisors to the US government were those primarily responsible for committing and maintaining the mistaken view about HIV --- Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birks, Robert Redfield (director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] for several years).
Redfield, now retired, points out in his memoir [11] that he had recognized the probable lab origin of COVID from the beginning. He illustrates nicely the important generality that the recognized experts in a particular field or on a particular topic can be very much right on one matter and very much wrong about even a closely related one; and that they can be right when their opinion is maverick and non-mainstream (COVID lab origin) while they can also be wrong when they agree with the mainstream (HIV/AIDS).
My own dim view of Redfield’s supposed expertise stems from the fact that I first came across his name in a joint publication from the Army HIV Research Group that ought to have caused its authors to recognize that the HIV hypothesis was wrong [12].
Not commonly known in the HIV story is that the US government’s Office of Research Integrity (ORI) had found Robert Gallo guilty of scientific misconduct for misappropriating a sample obtained from the French team that later was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of HIV, which Gallo had claimed for himself, a claim that was ignored by the Nobel committee.
The ORI finding was later retracted on the technical ground that deliberate intent on the part of Gallo had not been proved; however, Gallo’s intent and general dishonesty seem perfectly clear [13]. Yet somehow Gallo’s undeserved high reputation has survived: “Living Legend: Dr. Robert Gallo — renowned as a co-discoverer of HIV” [14]; “the storied career of one of the world’s most influential virologists” [15].
The HIV blunder has left permanent marks on virology as a whole, because HIV “tests” have never been validated with a gold standard based on purified samples of actual virions of the postulated virus. The presence of HIV, and even its amount (“viral load”), is simply inferred from detection of bits of RNA or DNA that are presumed characteristic of, and specific for, the postulated virus.
The last half-century has seen major errors by the scientific and medical mainstream “consensus”, recognized and publicly proclaimed as errors at the time, by substantial minorities of well-established, high-achieving experts who were nevertheless ignored by the official powers-that-be.
With HIV/AIDS, there was the Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV-AIDS Hypothesis [16]; with COVID-19, the Great Barrington Declaration [17]; with climate change, the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change [18]. In each case, the dissent from the mainstream consensus was initiated by some dozens or so fully qualified, well-regarded members of the relevant scientific community, subsequently joined by many hundreds of other signatories.
To avoid repetition of such major blunders, policy-makers must pay attention whenever a professional “consensus” is openly criticized and opposed by a significant group of fully qualified experts. To that end, they must be informed by advisers who know and understand the histories of science and medicine, especially the histories of modern times. Presidential Science Advisers and Committees, and analogous House and Senate Committees, must be staffed primarily not by technical experts but by historians, scholars of science and technology studies. Policy-making should then call on the help of a Science Court [19] to adjudicate disagreements between mainstream consensus and well-founded dissent.
**********************************************************************************************************
[1] Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, HarperPerennial, 1992 (revised edition)
[1a] Paul D. Thacker, RealClearInvestigations, “COVID cover-up: Hiding star researcher Ralph Baric’s ties to”; 28 April 2026;
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2026/04/28/covid_cover-up_campaign_to_hide_star_researcher_ralph_barics_ties_to_global_pandemic_1179562.html
[2] “Lab Leak: the true origins of Covid-19”, The White House, 18 April 2025; https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19
[3] Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic, “After action review of the COVID-19 pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward”, December 4, 2024;
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2024.12.04-SSCP-FINAL-REPORT-ANS.pdf
[4] “WHO Scientific advisory group issues report on origins of COVID-19”, 27 June 2025; https://www.who.int/news/item/27-06-2025-who-scientific-advisory-group-issues-report-on-origins-of-covid-19
[5] Jin-Hong Yoo, “On the controversies surrounding the lab-leak theory of COVID-19”, J. Korean Med. Sci.,;40 (16, 2025):e153
[6] David L. Goodstein, “Rangings of the mind”, Science, 256 (1992) 1034-36
[7] Henry H. Bauer, Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, University of Illinois Press, 1992
[8] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland 2017
[9] “Doctors are not scientists”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/doctors-are-not-scientists
“Science-deficiency of the MD-trained: Robert Gallo and Anthony Fauci”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/science-deficiency-of-the-md-trained
[10] Henry Bauer, The Case against HIV, October 2013, updated December 2017; https://web.archive.org/web/20250305094201/https://www.thecaseagainsthiv.net/
[11] Robert R. Redfield, Redfield’s Warning: What I Learned (But Couldn’t Tell You) Might Save Your Life, Skyhorse, 2025
[12] Burke et al., Human immunodeficiency virus infections . . “, New England Journal of Medicine, 317 (1987) 131-136; teenage females tested positive more often than teenage male. See also graphs showing that on pp. 26 & 101 in Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007
[13] John Crewdson, Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Little, Brown, 2002
[14] Newsletter, Global Virus network; https://gvn.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Living-Legend.pdf
[15] https://health.usf.edu/virology-institute/founder
[16] https://www.virusmyth.com/aids/group.htm
[17] https://gbdeclaration.org/
[18] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1260/0958305042886732
[19] Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017, chapter 12