Now they tell us.

“We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives.” So reads the headline on Princeton professor Zeynep Tufekci’s March 16 article in The New York Times. The event was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the bad misleading came from scientists who purposefully discredited the now widely accepted theory that the virus originated from a leak in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the Times article appeared one day short of five years from the publication in Nature Medicine of an article by five scientists, led by Kristian Andersen, titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” “We do not believe,” the article states, “that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

In April 2020, Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told his boss, then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, that he hoped “proximal origin” would put down “the very dangerous conspiracy theory” that the virus originated from a lab leak. The next day, Fauci recommended the paper to reporters as the product of a “group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists” without mentioning that he had commissioned it and dictated its conclusion.

The paper “misled me and many others into thinking a lab leak was implausible,” writes science writer Matt Ridley, who was a voting member of Britain’s House of Lords in 2020. Donald McNeil Jr., who was the Times’ lead science writer in 2020, said scientists “clearly misled me early on” and that their article threw him “off track” and influenced the paper’s coverage for months.

So it’s not surprising that the theory that COVID-19 spread from a lab leak was dismissed as a “fringe theory” by The Washington Post or that the Times mocked former Trump health official Robert Redfield for believing it. Nor that such outlets have shown little interest in the fact that the lab leak theory was accepted early on by the FBI and by the Biden administration Energy Department by early 2023.

The publication of Tufekci’s article in the Times signals a change in the wind of elite opinion. So does the publication in the Times last October of reporter Nicholas Confessore’s deeply reported account of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the University of Michigan, aptly subtitled “What Went Wrong?”

Confessore documented how the University of Michigan’s DEI programs, the largest and most generously funded at any university, increased rather than decreased racial tensions. Their premise was that systemic white racism was ineradicable and must be fought with indoctrination sessions and racial quotas and preferences. Give the Times credit for publishing Confessore’s article less than a month before the election.

The commitment of major corporations to DEI proved no more sincere than former Soviet bureaucrats’ faith in Marxism-Leninism.

One answer is that the experts and the elites have shown miserable judgment.

Now we hear complaints, some of them plausible, that Trump and Elon Musk are destroying institutions possessed of expert wisdom and elite credentials. It’s understandable, given recent history, that many Americans are putting little stock in those complaints.