[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-how-amateur-sleuths-broke...
Vaccination rates are nearing immunity across the major US population centers. I can imagine "they" wanted to ensure orderly vaccinations and return to the normal economic activity before any possible disruption of the political order.
Far-fetched, I know. But if you had to have a theory, here is one.
During the election, most of the media decided to ignore anything they were afraid would help Trump or hurt Biden.
Whether an activist media is good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader.
“But Trump’s lies are cheeky and fun!
Yeah, and the establishment’s lies are cruel and tragic.”
Of course this is an overstatement; Trump’s lies were not pretty but the point is that obvious lies are significantly less damaging than well-hidden lies. It’s the skillful liars that one needs to be wary of.
Are you aware of the top cable news network, the newer smaller ones, the media holding companies that dominate local news affiliates and dictate conservative talking points through their hosts, the massively popular hard-right conservative influencers, Facebook, etc?
It’s not that the media wanted to avoid helping Trump or hurting Biden, even going so far as to withhold reporting the truth of the pandemic’s origin. But rather that the media had a higher threshold of evidence for publishing accusations of malfeasance against another nationstate than Trump did, and hadn’t met that threshold till recently.
Trump was notoriously flippant, with low or no standard for truth, or even merely diplomatic tact. His MO is not truth-finding but rather saying anything distressing to his political adversaries. He is an archetypal Internet troll with the soapbox of the US presidency.
He spent four years doing that, essentially crying wolf over and over. By the time the pandemic hit, the media was universally resistant to serving as a megaphone to amplify his trolling.
Thus they held back on this story until they could piece together and verify enough of it to meet their higher threshold of evidence. That simply took until now to do.
* A Wired article detailed how the whole basis for social distancing and masking was wrong, based on two unrelated facts that got mixed together 60 years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
* Texas and Florida eliminated not just lockdowns but also all mask usage and the predicted spike in cases didn't happen.
* Fauci was caught lying to Congress about funding gain-of-function research.
* And probably the most direct trigger for this topic, Buzzfeed got and released Fauci's emails through a FoIA request just a couple days ago, which among other things revealed that he was warned about it possibly being a lab leak right at the beginning of the pandemic.