I'm not arguing that "government" will tell population the truth. Rather that if a President is making an extraordinary claim that is actually based on some concrete details in a classified briefing, then we would expect that President to reference those details - especially a President who readily publicized classified information. That he did not points to the claim as being from the same vein of political misinformation as non-existent "wmds".
> To discount a whole tree of idea ideas because some jackass is shaking it, maybe just ignore the jackass and still evaluate the ideas.
Sure, this is valid if one is taking the time to sit down and examine the topic themselves from first principles and thoroughly verified facts. But, at least to me, the aspect of where Covid came from didn't deserve that effort of investigation, especially compared to analyzing things like how to protect myself.
Without analyzing everything from scratch, one is left to examine other people's arguments. And the problem created by someone in a strong leadership position spewing bullshit is that it creates a strong attractor for many other people to choose the same conclusion, and then work backwards fleshing out the details to support it. So it's not that the whole tree of ideas should be ruled out, but rather that legitimate arguments supporting that tree of ideas become practically indistinguishable from bad faith ones. This isn't a desirable state of affairs, but rather the pragmatic reaction to strong distortion of the information landscape - especially when the distortion is pushing towards a destructive course of action.