The CDC has behaved throughout the pandemic like a naughty child with a guilty conscience.

The reaction to Covid by the public health apparatus has left me scratching my head almost since the beginning.  Several things have just never added up.

1) Why the determination to quarantine the healthy?

2) Why the rush to implement wide-spread policies that reflect a belief in asymptomatic spread when the evidence for it is, as best, anecdotal or of Chinese origin?

3) Why has the CDC behaved as if most of what we know from virology is somehow inapplicable where Covid-19 is concerned?

4) Why the months-long determination to discourage interest in Covid-19 origins?

5) Why the sudden late change in narrative regarding Covid-19 origins?

These and related questions have puzzled me almost from the start.

I offer one possible explanation. I don't offer it as anything other than an intellectual exercise in trying to understand why all of these phenomenon have exhibited themselves.

The recent reports of a Chinese defector with concrete information about Covid-19 origins may account for the shift in media and bureaucratic narrative. In short, the media and bureaucratic-government complex need to get out in front of what may be some disturbing revelations.

But more than this, what if some in government have suspected almost from the start that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin? What if Fauci et al have been funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, as has been widely reported, and that there was genuine fear that Covid-19 was synthetic and its clinical progression and behavior was completely unknown?  If some within the bureaucracy feared that Covid-19 may have an unnatural origin, and might behave very differently than a natural virus, that could explain the unprecedented behavior and policy prescriptions they have pushed for.

Now, it could just be what some people on the right believe, which is that the political and bureaucratic classes are power mad and opportunistic. But there did seem to be genuine and widespread fear on the left.

An alternative possibility is that the flailing and panicky policy prescriptions that have emerged from official quarters are due to the fact that some officials have suspected all along that Covid-19 is a manufactured virus, and that it may have had unknown and potentially catastrophic behaviors that the world had never seen before.

The CDC has behaved throughout the pandemic like a naughty child with a guilty conscience. It could be pure and simple bureaucratic incompetence. But I have begun to wonder if there are other explanations.