Recent filings from a lawsuit by the Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general against the Biden administration reveal that Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg gave Dr. Anthony Fauci his personal phone number shortly before the platform started to crack down on alleged COVID misinformation. 

Is this how The Post — and many others — got banned, throttled or labeled as purveyors of misinformation for merely raising the possibility (as we did in a prescient February 2020 op-ed) that COVID originated from an accidental lab-leak in Wuhan? 

Of course federal and state health agencies have the right to take to social media to call out actual errors and engage in arguments (even shrill and tendentious ones). 

But leveraging state power and cozy relationships with Big Tech to suppress stories that might implicate muck-a-mucks like Fauci for spectacularly bad judgment (in this case, championing funding for viral gain-of-function research in China) is deeply unethical.