This is a very simplistic statement that doesn't acknowledge the realities of how research funds are distributed in both government-funded and privately-funded

This is a very simplistic statement that doesn't acknowledge the realities of how research funds are distributed in both government-funded and privately-funded research programs, or the other kinds of pressures that can be brought to bear by interested parties with deep pockets and political influence. For example, research into novel uses of out-of-patent drugs is not incentivized in American academics because universities are eager to license new, patentable drugs to pharmaceutical corporations and thus earn a percentage of the profits from their sale, and this is reflected in NIH grant disbursements. Similarly, DOE funds for renewable energy research have been miniscule for decades, resulting in few American universities having anything like a robust well-funded renewable energy R & D program - and that is due to pressures applied by politicians in the pay of the fossil fuel lobby. Scientists have to follow the funding, and only if such funding is available is novelty - in that specific area - rewarded by the incentive structure. Additionally, as the article notes (emphasis added): > "Sometimes, a scientific consensus is established because vested interests have diligently and purposefully transformed a situation of profound uncertainty into one in which there appears to be overwhelming evidence for what becomes the consensus view." The most notable 20th century example is probably the plant breeding program controlled by Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, and while it may be normal to suppose 'that could never happen in the open American academic system', there have been some examples of this kind of thing, although people will also make false accusations of this happening as part of their effort to discredit reliable science. For example, the basic science of CO2 and climate was established by 1980, and since then it's just been a question of fine-tuning estimates of the magnitude of the CO2 effect, but there was a multi-million dollar effort funded by fossil fuel interests for decades to overturn that concensus. In contrast, while there was an effort in the 1980s to claim that HIV (the virus) was not the cause of AIDS (the disease), that never got much traction against the broad consensus that the cause had been discovered. The Covid origin case is a bit murkier; at first it was natural to assume that the virus had a zoonotic origin, based on previous events, but it does look like leading academics in the US in the virology field came to a deliberately false and misleading consensus on the zoonotic origin story early on for what are pretty clearly political reasons - even though they knew there was at least as much evidence in favor of the engineered lab origin theory. Now, if things were as bad in American academics as they were in Soviet Russia, proponents of the lab leak origin would all be sitting in a Siberian gulag, so I guess it's not as bad as all that. Science does remain the only real tool we have to coming to a factual understanding of our physical world, but it's also subject to manipulation by government and private entities. Informed skepticism is required when it comes to interpreting and understanding scientific claims - faith and trust are not that advisable.