I feel it's more complicated than that. I wouldn't be surprise if Beijing does not actually know whether this was a lab leak or not.

The local government might know. They would have started a cover up reflexively.

But in either case, it could be that neither the local government nor central government wants to know or to find out. Ultimately, destroying the evidence and failing to cooperate with foreign investigators has cost China very little or nothing, even.

In short, I feel China should be admonished for covering things up, but not that the cover up proves the lab leak.

In a state like China, this would probably happen as a panic response, not because the people covering up and destroying evidence know that their institution has done something bad/embarrassing, but because they fear it might be so and it's far better for their personal careers to suppress too much than to suppress too little. It's quite possible the people running cover-ups knew as little as us.

And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.

this is one of the leaps of faith I allude to in my top level comment - just because a bad actor is involved and would be incentivized to cover something up, doesn't mean that the lab leak theory is correct. Those two ideas are not connected.

A really easy knockdown for this kind of argument is - why did they close down, sanitize, and dispose of all animals and items at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? If your argument is that a coverup points to the source, why wouldn't that mean the wet market was the origin?

But isn't the wet market hypothesis equally bad looking for China?

Also the head of the US CDC at the time saying it was a lab leak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s

Of course, it should point to China. They're the ones who didn't shut down the wet markets after SARS-CoV-1.

Source? Your account is no better hearsay.

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