It's because the people that lied about the pandemic and vaccines never got punished and we just went on with our day.
People's lives got ruined and we seriously had people saying that parents refusing to get their children vaccinated should havd their children taken away.
Who lied? What, specifically, did they lie about? Some people died from it. Some people have long term disability from it. Without the benefit of hindsight, what would you have done differently if you were in control? How would you have justified your choices over the alternatives?
We've heard the claims before: that Fauci and others lied about masks, vaccine safety and efficacy, the possible origins, and lockdowns. In his retrospectives on the pandemic, Fauci has indicated he regrets saying that masks didn't work, he admitted that vaccines for COVID weren't perfect, NIH made serious errors of judgement around funding viral research in China, and I think he has a much better understanding of the balance between large-scale public health policy and the economy.
I don't think people learn these lessons until they've actually lived through the process of being a public health official trying to minimize death and suffering through epidemiological processes and realize that it's a truly multidimensional problem with a great deal of ambiguity. It would be fascinating if, after his term is over, RFK Jr said something enlightened like "This whole process was a learning experience for me; I went into the ignorant of many things that public health officials already knew".
The people who lent funding and technology (in the form of humanized mice) to the virus engineering efforts at at Wuhan were also involved in the creation of the Proximal Origins paper that they pretended was impartial and showed the virus was natural and the result of zoonotic spillover.
* The contract number for this research from NIAID was (I believe) R01 1R01AI110964. This was probably funding the research described in the DARPA "Defuse" document, but I believe that it was meant to be a secondary source of funding. [0]
* We relied on the US funder of the gain of function research to dictate what treatments everyone was going to be allowed or not.
* A. G. Huff, a former manager at Ecohealth Alliance, wrote (among other things) that Ecohealth Alliance not only played fast and loose with federal contracting rules, but would fund experiments in advance of and in anticipation of gaining federal contracts to cover the cost of said research. You can find his book on amazon. [1]
* From the very early days of the pandemic there were fraudulent papers on how to treat the disease. Some of the very first ones were the Surgisphere papers which used an essentially fictional, fabricated database and were in turn used to limit treatment options for covid. This included not just novel antivirals like HCQ and Ivermectin but also more common drugs such as azithromycin and ACE inhibitors. These papers continued to be cited authoritatively _after_ they were retracted. [2]
* About that ACE-inhibitor paper? Well, there were later studies that found out it was not only wrong, but harmful, because ACE inhibitors helped for covid: [3] [4] [5] [6]
So, yes, there were lies about the disease's origin and how to treat it when roughly two million people died from it in the US.
* At the time when basically everything _but_ Remdesivir was off limits to US patients, the WHO was recommending _against_ its use for covid. [7]
People's lives got ruined and we seriously had people saying that parents refusing to get their children vaccinated should havd their children taken away.