That’s bad but not an interpretation one should jump to in a context where it was very easy to get things wrong and rather little incentive to lie.
You think CDC et al didn’t know they had limited public credibility with which they could guide public behavior? These people live and breathe questions of institutional credibility all day every day. They obviously know their careers are put at risk even by being wrong never mind by lying.
The whole "horse dewormer" bullshit propagated by MSM was clearly a lie (in so far that this medicine has been used for decades by humans). So, you can't even trust MSM to not be a 'supersharer' of misinformation.
If people were avoiding FOIA by having candid discussions on private servers and deliberately misspelling words all while telling the public a contradictory story, that is strong evidence of lying.
If the private communications matched the public ones and there were no efforts to obfuscate, then the best conclusion would be they just called it wrong.
I agree hiding from FOIA looks bad, degrades trust in general, and the responsible parties should be punished, but it is definitely not dispositive of lying.
I didn't see any emails where they were showing agreement with a different set of facts than what they were communicating to the public? Open to seeing sources behind that claim though.
It doesn't prove (but, uh, is rather strongly suggestive) that their earlier statements were lies or contradicted by the records they're hiding, but it is itself a lie.
