I know your post is tongue-in-cheek/sarcastic, but there absolutely was a coverup/propoganda campaign waged by the mainstream media and international health organizations to silence any inquiry regarding potential origin in a lab.
This is an article from the Washington Post yesterday, which summarizes it, albeit still doesn't talk about how dishonest it was for people to characterize the lab theory as "conspiracy theory" when the real origin was actually unknown.
Some highlights:
July 4 (2020): The Times of London reports that a virus 96 percent identical to the coronavirus that causes covid-19 was found in an abandoned copper mine in China in 2012. The bat-infested copper mine in southwestern China was home to a coronavirus that left six men sick with pneumonia, with three eventually dying, after they had been tasked with shoveling bat guano out of the mine. This virus was collected in 2013 and then stored and studied at WIV.
March 22(2021): The Australian newspaper reports: “Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers working on coronaviruses were hospitalized with symptoms consistent with covid-19 in early November 2019 in what U.S. officials suspect could have been the first cluster.”
Timeline: How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible
It's becoming increasingly clear that they're backtracking from their original narrative because the most likely scenario is actually a lab accident. It was reported in March of this year that Wuhan Institute of Virology researches had been hospitalized with Covid-like symptoms back in November 2019.
Back in July 2020, it was known that the WIV was storing/working with coronavirus samples which match 96% to Covid-19.
Yet as recently as a few weeks ago, posters on these forums - all liberals - were still calling the possibility it was released from a lab "conspiracy theory", because the MSM and Fauci were still propagating that narrative.
In that same thread, an article by Nicholas Wade was presented - the overwhelming response by the left was "why should we listen to Nicholas Wade"?
Well, the Washington Post seems to think we should listen to him. From that same article:
May 5: Former New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade,
writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reviews the evidence and makes a strong case for the lab-leak theory. He focuses in particular on the furin cleavage site, which increases viral infectivity for human cells. His analysis yields this quote from David Baltimore, a virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology: “When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”
I highlighted that those who were at the forefront of dismissing the lab theory of the origin of Covid were those who were performing/funding Gain of Function research in Wuhan, and, as such, were potentially culpable. Of course those same folks that derided the lab theory as "conspiracy" didn't hesitate to label such information as nonsense or unimportant.
