Respectfully, I think you’re cherry picking the current (more correct) understanding and missing what the consensus was at the time with the benefit of hindsight.
At the time “masks don’t work, “it’s not airborne”, and especially “it wasn’t a lab leak” were the overarching consensus - it was a handful of minority voices that pushed back on this, and they were not the authority.
The authorities largely failed us, my guess is because of political partisanship and motivated reasoning (along with a weaker MSM with bad journalists and some CCP pressure on WHO).
It was largely specific individual voices that were more correct at each step, rather than authority. The trick is you had to be able to tell which ones.
