I hadn't considered this before, but you're right that most of the people dismissing the 'lab leak' theory seem to believe that their intellectual opponents are proposing that a 'premeditated conspiracy' took place.
In any case, if I were a PRoC official, I would try to reduce the chance of any (direct or circumstantial) evidence of a lab leak came to light. That said, even suppression of circumstantial evidence is not necessarily evidence of either a lab leak or pre-meditated conspiracy.
Please don't resort to personal insults on HN. It's a violation of the guidelines[1] and makes for poor and uninteresting discussion.
Instead...
> It's extremely hard to figure out who we're talking to.
...don't resort to personal attacks, and assess the argument that the individual is making, without setting up a straw-man argument. If you're unclear what their assumptions are, then ask.
Why are you insulting me? I honestly don't know where this virus came from, and am more interested in what the polarized discourse says about our current state of affairs.
I don't see why this would be the case. It could be a lab leak with nobody at the being aware or having evidence. Why must people be in on a secret coverup?
Many activities that make evaluating the lab leak hypothesis difficult were done in the open: Destruction of early virus samples and deletion of Gene sequencing from public databases.
>Add to that the fact that covid is a close cousin of already-known endemic viruses and that nothing about it looks engineered at all, and... this is still just a natural virus, sorry.
The virus does not need to have been engineered to have leaked from a lab. Natural viruses can and do leak from labs as well.