Denials from authorities seemed political all along, and public trust will take a long time to recover.
Government finagling and misdirecting, especially in crises, are destructive to the long-term public good. And in the end they’re always destructive to personal reputations.
The Journal last Sunday upended an old debate with a big exclusive: The Energy Department has told the White House it believes a lab leak was the most likely source of the Covid-19 pandemic. As reporters Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel noted, the department’s new stand is important because it results from new intelligence and because of the agency’s expertise—it oversees a network of labs. Two days later Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed the FBI’s view that it was “most likely a potential lab incident . . . a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”
