Also important though is it never really went away. For all the talk of censorship and suppression the possibility of a lab leak never left the investigation. It's also a very difficult thing to investigate without access to the labs to see what strains they were working on looked like which we still don't have afaik. It's been a process of eliminating other possiblities to some extent as other vectors that could be looked into were and turned out to be less likely.
Sort of true -- but only because you can't kill the idea, the need to find the cause of the pandemic to avoid a repeat.
This is cold comfort to the people who were getting banned had their accounts cancelled for suggesting things that turned out to be actually true.
There's was a lot of collateral damage here, all in the name of... well I'm not sure. Trust is hard to build, and once broken takes a long time to regain.
The point is, as a society we're heading in the wrong direction. Freedom of speech is becoming freedom for those who keep their mouths shut.
The average person was much more worried about the potential harm to millions of citizens than a much smaller uptick in one particular sector. It's of paramount importance that we don't repeat the mistakes that led to the pandemic in the first place. The only way we can do that is getting to the bottom of what happened.
If "possible Asian hate crimes" was the best excuse that the censorship industrial complex could come up with, then it is clear to me that any excuse would have done, and the conclusions I draw is that the suppression was 100% politically motivated. I want to know who was involved in making the decision to suppress, and to what ends they were trying to shape public opinion. At the minimum I want to know who I should be working to vote out of office.
How can I know who to vote for when we're normalizing lying as a justifiable policy up and down the chain of government communication and mass media?