1. “Drosten/Fauci/Ferguson [insert your corona tsar here] wouldn’t have ascended to high position if he weren’t good”

Bureaucracies don’t select for expertise. They select for people good at exploiting patronage networks, escaping blame & telling convenient stories.

2. Once a field is politicised (i.e., there is demand from those in power & in control of funding for specific narratives), the people who rise to the top will be those willing to engage in the politicised discourse. These are emphatically not the good, talented researchers.

3. Instead they are a lot of over-promoted, outclassed people eager to exploit alternate routes to success.

These patterns are observed over and over again in academia, even in small fields far from the spotlight.