On Sunday, I wrote a column about the perils of politicizing science. In it, I was critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIAID Director and Chief Medical Advisor to the President. Many readers expressed their disdain for my treatment of Fauci in emails, the comments section, and on social media. Let’s take a closer look.

Anyone familiar with my column knows that my personal politics are far from being right-wing and that throughout the entire COVID epidemic, during which I’ve written dozens and dozens of columns and long-form pieces on the subject, I have advocated a follow the science, listen to the experts approach.

In fact, I’ve defended Dr. Fauci against spurious and baseless attacks on numerous occasions, perhaps most notably in my review of the propaganda film Plandemic, a nonsense-riddled documentary that went viral on social media. However, unlike partisans, objective journalists cannot afford to be ride or die for any team or individual. As we uncover more information, our opinions can and must change to comport with what is best known if we are going to be of any use in informing public opinion.

That is, in fact, the exact job of an opinion columnist. The role of a reporter is to objectively report the who, what, when, and where of the news, while opinion columnists are to analyze such reporting and its source materials in order to offer a factual analysis as to the implications and what can and, in most cases, should be done.

As Americans have become increasingly divided on nearly every front, one can certainly argue that much of the media has abdicated those roles in favor of picking one side of the issue and playing into the confirmation bias of that portion of the readership. In other words, they tell a large number of people what they want to hear and write off the rest.

There are many incentives to do so. For starters, the appetite for objectivity isn’t as great as most people like to think. People of all political persuasions say they’d like the media to be more objective; however, that usually translates to more like the media outlets I like, meaning the ones that tell me what I want to hear. So, from a commercial standpoint, playing to the crowd is rewarded more than calling it as you see it.

The influence exerted by commercial and institutional forces also ripples through big tech and its platforms. As such, there is often a stiff price for not dancing to whatever song those forces play, from being punished by their algorithms to being removed from their platforms entirely. So-called independent outlets that exist primarily on YouTube and other tech platforms may seem like they are less susceptible to such forces, but, in reality, they are just as vulnerable to such influence, as deviating from the institutional narrative can lead to not only penalties via the algorithm but demonetization or even an outright ban.

The larger point of Sunday’s column was that if only one scientific narrative is allowed across such a broad spectrum of platforms and some of the most credentialed experts feel as though it is too professionally dangerous to dissent, we are never going to be in the best position to deal with this or any other public health crisis.

The person who appears to have had the most influence over the prevailing narrative has been Dr. Anthony Fauci, and while many equally or even superiorly credentialed health experts have disagreed with Fauci’s assessments or proposals, there has been a very clear bias in terms of how each has been treated in both the corporate media and via the tech platforms. And the way that so many Americans (particularly Democrats) continue to dismiss or ignore the evidence against Fauci is beginning to look an awful lot like the way many Republicans responded to damning evidence against Trump.

In a trove of emails that were part of an FOIA request, it was revealed that several top scientific advisors told Fauci at the onset of the pandemic that they felt that the most likely scenario in terms of the virus' origin was that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab setting after having been altered for study.

On Jan. 31, 2020, after Covid’s genome was decoded, Fauci received an email from Kristian Andersen, head of the Andersen Lab at Scripps Research Institute in California. Anderson noted that the virus had some "unusual features“ and that some looked "potentially engineered.“ He also said he and his team found them "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,“ which is to say, lab-altered.

"On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir,“ wrote Andersen, an NIH-funded scientist. "The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.“

Dr. Michael Farzan, the scientist who discovered the human receptor on the original SARS virus, was troubled by the Receptor-Binding Domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Best I can tell, Farzan was perhaps the first person to voice concern over the furin cleavage site (FCS).

Sidenote: Furin is a protease enzyme. Protease enzymes break down proteins into smaller polypeptides or single amino acids, causing the formation of new protein products. They do this by cleaving the peptide bonds within proteins by hydrolysis, a reaction in which water breaks bonds. The unique furin cleavage site in SARS-CoC-2 is important because it enhances its transmissibility and ability to infect other tissue types in the body.

In a Feb. 2, 2020 email to Fauci, then-UK Health Advisor Dr. Jeremy Farrar told him that Farzan said he didn’t think the FCS was engineered into the virus but suggested that it would have been very unlikely to have evolved in nature and much more likely to have been the result of repeated passage (gain of function) in a lab setting.

"So, I think it becomes a question of how do you put all this together," wrote Farrar, "whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature - accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40."

A dozen scientists in the U.S. and Europe were included in the week-long chain of emails at the beginning of February. Several expressed similar concerns.

Dr. Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, wrote, "From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site." Professor Bob Garry, from the University of Texas, said he couldn’t, "figure out how this gets accomplished in nature."

Nevertheless, we know through those same emails that Fauci and his longtime colleague and ally, former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, worked hard to silence any expression of the lab leak theory right from the beginning, despite having understood how and why top scientists believed it was the most likely scenario.

Copying Fauci, Collins responded to Farrar his concern for a "swift convening of experts (WHO seems really the only option) is needed, or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony É"

In other words, this might do harm to our ability to conduct this kind of research, and it might not be looked upon kindly by China. Two weeks later, Farrar publicly called the idea of a lab leak a dangerous conspiracy theory, a position that Fauci would repeat over and over to the American public and its government, never mentioning that some of his top scientists had disagreed. If that’s not suppressing the science, what is?

There were other emails from scientists involved in similar research expressing similar concerns about such perceptions. Dutch scientist Dr. Ron Fouchier, whose H5N1 gain of function research was banned in the United States after it spread the disease to other mammals, wrote, "Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular."

It seems apparent that there are different camps among scientists when it comes to the risk vs. reward of such experiments and who is on which side cannot be ignored when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2014, there seemed to be a very strong case against such high-risk experimentation and the Obama administration put a pause on funding such studies.

We also know that Fauci and Collins were the ones who engineered the end of that ban in 2017, and that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research institute specializing in the study of coronaviruses, was actively engaged in gain of function studies on coronaviruses in horseshoe bats at the time of the outbreak. We know that EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit, was the conduit for U.S. government grants for gain of function studies at the Wuhan lab and that studies taking place with government funding did include gain of function experiments. We know that grant money for the controversial experiments came from Fauci’s NAIAD. We know that, previously, NIH staff expressed concerns that some of the studies seemed to include the then-paused gain of function experiments and that the lab was criticized for lax safety measures as late as 2018.

That’s a lot to know, and when you put it on top of our knowledge that the S1/S2 Furin Cleavage Site on the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus makes it much more transmissible and allows it to impact other cell types in the body, and that while it has been found to have occurred naturally in some other coronaviruses, it has never been observed in SARS-related coronaviruses, you begin to see why so many scientists were skeptical about this having occurred naturally, let alone in the very same location as the Wuhan Lab.

Nevertheless, Fauci and Collins created an atmosphere in which it became professionally dangerous for scientists to express such concerns or media outlets to report it. Additionally, for a long time, people talking about the lab leak theory’s merits were accused of spreading disinformation and risked being deplatformed. Explain to me how suppressing scientific debate is not creating a dangerous environment from which to attempt to battle a pandemic?

I completely understand why so many Americans fell in love with Dr. Fauci at the onset of the pandemic. His calm demeanor and soothing bedside manner were a breath of fresh air in the era of Trump. Who wouldn’t want an erudite grandfather figure driving the boat when the alternatives were mostly ideological reactionaries with a history of ignoring science altogether? But to ignore the obvious at this point is delusional, and for people who accused Trump supporters of being in a cult, Democrats who still insist on ignoring the evidence and attacking the messenger when it comes to Fauci do not look any more independent in their thought. If your argument is that our cult leader is smarter than their cult leader, so be it. You’re still in a cult. Consider this my last attempt at intervention.

It is not only plausible but likely that this whole, long, miserable pandemic and all of the death and despair it has wrought was not caused by bats or wet markets but by the resumption of dangerous experimentation that we had good reason to abandon. If we cannot put political divisions aside in order to have a broad conversation about what that means and how to move forward, then we might as well abandon all of our pressing challenges and just throw a big party before we go down in flames. A society so completely paralyzed by culture wars is not long for this world, not as a superpower, anyway.