March 2020:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/chinese-scientists-destro...
That's standard biosecurity when a new, dangerous pathogen is discovered. Regulatory agencies in other countries would have done the same thing.
A bunch of patient samples were sent out to diagnostic labs before anyone knew they contained a novel coronavirus. You can imagine regulators freaking out when they discover those samples contain a new, possibly dangerous virus.
And you are talking about something else.
From the Nature article you link to:
> The sequences were associated with a paper in which researchers used nanopore-sequencing technology to detect SARS-CoV-2 genetic material in samples from people. That study was published in the journal Small in June 2020, having been posted on bioRxiv in March of that year.
> the sequences Bloom recovered were not hidden: they are described in detail, with enough sequence information to know their evolutionary relationship to other early SARS-CoV-2 sequences, in the Small paper.
You're referring to something completely different, which has nothing to do with bat coronavirus research or the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A group of researchers working on new sequencing techniques for patient samples (not bat coronaviruses) withdrew their raw data from a database. They then published the key data in a peer-reviewed journal.[1] It's better to have the raw data, but it's not as if the researchers hid their results. And again, this has nothing to do with bat coronaviruses or the WIV.
The WIV publishes the viruses it discovers. They published RaTG13, which is now recognized as the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2 (but not the progenitor), in 2016. WIV scientists regularly publish papers, give talks at scientific conferences, and collaborate with international scientists. We have a very good idea of what they had and what viruses they were working with. Nobody from the WIV ever mentioned anything that looks like SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic began.
1. https://doi.org/10.1002/smll.202002169