Ross Douthat

We didn't know how it affected children, for instance, in schools.

I had little kids in school at the time.

And it seemed to me that there was an argument essentially for two weeks, a month, like kind of these policies as extreme but temporary measures.

Do you think that there is...

room for taking extreme measures like we took in that period as a means of buying time?

Once you've crossed that line, yeah, you can never recross it.

And what is your diagnosis of why there was such a closing of ranks?

I don't want to— Well, and we don't have—I mean, we don't have sort of the smoking gun in terms of the minutes of the Communist Party meeting where they acknowledge it's a lab leak or something like that, right?

So it is as much a scientific debate still as a kind of intelligence community debate.

So this is what so-called gain-of-function research is trying to do.

It's trying to

essentially hype up multiple viruses and the ones that become the most deadly are the ones you try and treat?

So you'll have a set of vaccines whose efficacy is hypothetical.

It could be other kind of measures, but let's say vaccines.

So part of the scientific establishment was committed to this project.

Including the NIH.

Including the NIH.

And there was...

at the very least, a good chance that that led to COVID-19 and the pandemic.

Why then do you think that overcommitted the establishment to school closures, mask mandates, and everything else?