When major failures occur, institutions like Boeing, the FAA, and NASA instinctively circle the wagons to protect themselves. This "blocker" behavior obstructs truth-seeking "searchers" (investigators, journalists) and prevents proper root cause analysis, which is essential for future prevention. This pattern was repeated with COVID-19.
Virology experts, acting as "blockers," launched a highly successful misinformation campaign. They used prestigious scientific journals to frame the animal spillover theory as a decided fact and labeled any inquiry into a lab leak as a "conspiracy theory," effectively stifling investigation for years and making the topic partisan.
In the Challenger disaster, physicist Richard Feynman's fierce independence and truth-seeking nature allowed him to uncover the truth while the insider-heavy commission was ineffective. This archetype of a brilliant, unbiased outsider was critically absent in the COVID-19 response, which was controlled by insiders with conflicts of interest.
Bill Gurley aggregates the death and cost of five major disasters (Challenger, 737 MAX, etc.) to show COVID was orders of magnitude more devastating. Yet, unlike those smaller events which triggered multiple, bipartisan, and press-led investigations, the COVID response lacked any comparable, committed effort to find the root cause.
A grant proposal from Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance, connecting US virologists with the Wuhan lab, detailed a plan to insert a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus. This is the exact feature that made COVID-19 so transmissible. This bombshell document was uncovered years later and largely ignored by major media.
The CAPA (Corrective and Preventive Action) framework, used in engineering and science, mandates that one must first confirm a failure's root cause before implementing effective prevention. By failing to rigorously investigate COVID's origins, society has skipped this critical step, leaving it vulnerable to a repeat disaster.
The individuals the public relied on as impartial experts (Fauci, Collins, etc.) were outspoken advocates for the very type of gain-of-function research that was a plausible cause of the pandemic. This inherent bias made them incapable of objective investigation, and they actively worked to suppress inquiry instead of searching for the truth.