Donald Trump and his Republican allies have epically botched the response to the pandemic. This is not in dispute by anyone who is being even vaguely honest about the situation. What is in dispute is whether or not we will do what’s necessary to learn from the mistakes and malice that defined this dark moment in history. And if you pay attention, you can detect the nascent effort to make sure that we will not learn anything.

In specific, you can hear the quiet but steady drumbeat that could set the stage for a cover-up — one designed to quarantine all the inconvenient facts at a safe social distance from the power elite that made this mess so much worse than it had to be.