Part of the problem is that the entire mainstream media narrative of the pandemic was warped by using it to get Trump out of office, which lead to downplaying h

Part of the problem is that the entire mainstream media narrative of the pandemic was warped by using it to get Trump out of office, which lead to downplaying how important China's actions were. In particular, I remember a lot of the press harping on about how the Obama administration wrote a pandemic plan and how much better everything would've gone if Trump followed it... except the plan wasn't exactly as described by the media. The most important thing, according to the document, was something none of the media coverage mentioned - it wasn't mask wearing, or lockdowns, or vaccinations or anything they talked about, it was actually getting accurate information from the country where the pandemic started. It hammered away on the fact that every other part of the pandemic response fundamentally relied on that information, there was no way to do without it, and if the pandemic started in a developing country without the staff to gather it the US should deploy their own mission there to get it. There was no advice on what to do if the country was a near-peer of the US which refused to release that info for internal political reasons. An accurate description of that document would've put a lot more of the blame on China, and that just wouldn't do politically.