They may cover up something completely orthogonal to Covid. For example, they may cover up a corruption scheme, to steal money granted for research, or they acted as proxy for Russians, to spy at USA, or they mismanaged facility and leaked virus from the lab in Wuhan second time, AFTER the initial outbreak (1.5-2.5 month of delay between projected start of epidemic in mid-September-mid-October and start of epidemic in Wuhan in December must be explained somehow), etc.

The “circumstantial evidence” is only novel if the event in question is novel, which the emergence of a new strain of a virus is not.

It is certain that a new strain of some virus is emerging right now next to a lab that works with viruses, because that is a thing that happens continuously in nature, and labs exist within nature. It’s also likely that such a new strain will not cause human illness, as most viruses do not.

SARS-COV-2 only looks novel to humans because it made a lot of humans sick. There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in a lab too. This says more about our self-regard than about the virus itself.

This would all be more compelling if the WIV were not explicitly experimenting with creating viruses like SARS-COV-2! If HIV had emerged proximal to a lab experimenting with creating viruses like HIV then that lab origin theory would be much more credible!

Saying “viruses like SARS-COV-2” only makes sense for broad applications of the word “like.”

As other comments have pointed out, while that lab was working with coronaviruses, none of the strains were genetically close to SARS-COV-2. Coronavirus is a broad category of viruses.

Betacoronaviruses with SARS-like attributes and natural reservoirs in bats is supposed to be a “broad application of the word ‘like’”? Bit of a stretch, no?

According to who? The lab?

> "There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in a lab too."

Scientists' best guess is that the precursor of the most common "M" virus jumped from the Cameroon chimps to humans sometime before 1931.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/virus/origins....

> the Chinese government has certainly acted like it was covering something up.

Yes, they covered up the existence of racoon dogs and other susceptible animals at the market.

I’m reading this as sarcasm, am I wrong? If so, it is such a bad faith response. It is well reported that China was highly uncooperative in providing records about the research that was occurring at WIV.

No its quite serious. China covered up the existence of susceptible animals at the market. If you want to take the actions of a cover up as being proof, then you have to look at that cover up as well. What people do instead, though, is pick and choose -- the actions surrounding the lab are evidence China is hiding a lab leak, while the actions surrounding the market are not evidence China is trying to hide a zoonotic spillover. There's nothing "bad faith" about that at all, unless you're so bought into the lab leak theory that any question of it is bad faith.

Do you have a link showing that China suppressed evidence of the presence of raccoon dogs? I just looked and couldn’t find, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

It’s a fair point that if suppression of evidence is to be considered an indication of guilt, it has to work both ways.

Edit: typo