I think he might be saying that imperfect knowledge and political agenda-driven pseudo-scientific wishcasting are not necessarily the same, and that the presence of the former is not necessarily indicative of the latter. This was a new disease that displayed characteristics of some known diseases, and so the approaches to it early on were similar to that taken to combat those known diseases while learning more about what made this disease tick, because what else were we to do as people started dying by the thousands?
Unfortunately, COVID also showed characteristics unique unto it, and the failures attended to some of those approaches became known.
Even more unfortunate is that certain people who wanted to do nothing but make political hay off it used those failures, including those borne of honest mistakes, as a way to cast political aspersions on even those health personnel who had no agenda but to defeat the disease, including, incredibly, nurses with feet on the ground. That, to me, was disgusting nearly beyond words.