Trump was the boy.
Everybody knows how that story ended, but as a reminder:
"This tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear, the villagers do not believe the boy's cries for help, and the flock is destroyed. The moral of the story is that liars will not be rewarded; even if they tell the truth, no one believes them. "
There's a cost to lying. Sometimes it's your own flock. Sometime's its everybody's flock. Maybe Trump was right, maybe he wasn't. The boy was right about the wolf, eventually, too. The moral remains the same.
There were many people in bioscience, virology, etc. who said it was possible and should not be discounted, but those people were hounded and shut up.
Twitter and FB had policies against it and even now, today Twitter suspended the account for the Fauci email leaker(s). So much for open discussion.