The can revise their views.
But in this situation, their views were chastised, ridiculed, suppressed, silenced, etc.....tenured professors and medical folks lost their jobs, etc.
There is no denying this, yet some here seem to.
I think there is more granularity there. A lot of folks were promoting then unproven treatments which may have caused serious harm. The idea was also lacking evidence, it was provocative and seriously reduced trust in the institutions. If it was a leak are the are hiding that (which they weren't, they simply did not know but have little evidence it was true) and that would then make public health a more dire situation. It wasn't that they were acting in that manner simply because of a disagreement, it was what it meant and the fact that there was little evidence for such a claim.
The outcome if that became the leading narrative could of been catastrophic.
The virus was very rough at the start but evolved to become a better virus lucky for us. In hindsight and in my gut during it, once we seen that deaths weren't piling up after the first year we should of came to our senses. The other problem is that because of those same measures our privileged vantage point in the current future may not afford us the perspective on the true seriousness because it didn't happen in actuality. So we are like of course it wasn't that bad!!
The whole thing was retarded. The one driver was that you had hospitals becoming overwhelmed which put the panic in people.
My area would be like, back to lockdowns, there has been one case.. like it was going to come into your home a run a train on you.