Why is a cover up necessary? SARS has leaked from the lab many times before, yet this fact is almost never mentioned in these discussions. The media does plenty of self-censorship.
People said the same thing about the government monitoring everyone's communications: "It could never be kept secret". Edward Snowden proved they were wrong, and this was kept a secret, for years.
To your point, it was even widely discussed in niche areas like tech blogs and HN. However, much the same way as this hypothesis it was dismissed as a conspiracy theory, widely debunked by “experts” and downplayed. Again, not claiming this makes lab leak a conspiracy, but the idea it needs to be 100% a secret does not need to be the case. The narrative just needs to be controlled to some extent.
I wonder if we need a better way to address safety related to research around potentially airborne diseases -- like maybe in the past things that could result in death are considered bad, but something that presently is not deadly, but being airborne and super contagious could mean it could mutate like crazy while in a large majority of the human population. Another not totally as crazy as it sounds now that we have things like long covid, what if we have something that basically has a minor, but real impact on people long term, but now apply that complication across a huge number of people and comparing the cumulative impact to say 1000 people dying of ebola is hard to compare.
So maybe respiratory diseases, no matter how dangerous they currently are should be heavily restricted to labs that can handle them, and then have international monitors at each of them with strict reporting rules not tied to any organization like WHO or UN or whatever, they are just there to report lab leaks no matter how small.
A cover up isn't very hard to execute if the involved parties all have aligned incentives - in this case, not ruining their careers, possibly destroying their entire professional field, and publicly accepting culpability for millions of deaths and other damages.
In a leak? Zero would be the minimum who would have knowledge of the leak. There is no law of the universe saying that anyone would be aware of what had happened or how, especially with an active disinterest and disincentives toward responsibility and accountability.
Not that many, probably 1, or maybe 3 to be conservative. Of course there are the institutional and governmental parties as well, but still not that many (1 lab director, maybe 1 executive above them, plus a handful of regulators with detailed knowledge of the labs operations). If it is the case that, say, the WIV leaked the initial virus, there's probably less than a dozen people in the world with positive knowledge of that fact.
I've seen fundings and positions related to COVID research popping up since at least mid 2020. Biorxiv submissions exploded. Certainly not a small group to deal with.
(on a serious note: the answer is, the scientists don't have to know about a leak for it to have happened, the important part is that they don't want to know. That is, China prefers if this question goes unanswered.)
How do they keep people from talking about something they'd rather not talk about? Why would they need to? Espcially since people tend to just scream "conspiracy theorist!", flag it off HN etc.
A couple handfuls, maybe a couple dozen? Seems not that hard to keep something like that quiet, especially when everyone involved would be strongly incentivized not to admit to being party to something like this.
Not saying it's true, but I don't think "they couldn't keep this a secret" is a particularly compelling rebuttal here.
