The absence of a federal or international commission to investigate COVID's origins is a reminder of a fundamental problem with government.

In March 2020, Dr. Robert Kadlec addressed a House committee to confirm his role and responsibilities as the federal government's top preparedness official coordinating the government's COVID-19 response.

As assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services , Kadlec offered a lengthy statement to lawmakers on the "four principal functions" of his role.

None of those functions involved downplaying without scientific evidence a theory that the virus emerged from a laboratory in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But that's what Kadlec now says he did by assisting Dr. Anthony Fauci, America's former top infectious diseases adviser, in his effort to suppress the lab leak theory.

Kadlec says it's a decision that keeps him up at night. Literally.

"I wake up at usually about 2 or 3 a.m. and think about it honestly, because it's something that we all played a role in," Kadlec told Sky News in an exclusive interview.

For much of 2020 and 2021, anyone who brought up the possibility that COVID-19 emerged from Wuhan risked being labeled a conspiracy theorist by legacy media and "fact-checkers."

It started in February 2020 when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) appeared on TV and raised questions about the Chinese government's "duplicity and dishonesty" on the matter.

Though Cotton explicitly stated that "we don't have evidence that this disease originated there," he was promptly accused of spreading "a conspiracy theory" by the New York Times and the Washington Post . (The latter eventually issued a correction . The former has not.)

Big Tech also got in on the action, including Facebook. The social media giant began banning content that suggested COVID-19 might have been man-made.