Devil’s advocate: the CCP seems quite proud of its pandemic response and appears to have had procedures in place to deal with SARS-like disease outbreaks. Their tone is triumphant. Given its past history with SARS and the fact that the WIV was specifically tasked with research on mitigation strategies for SARS-like illnesses, the CCP must have developed a playbook for outbreaks of natural SARS-like illnesses. Given their current tone, it’s very unlikely that playbook started with “first, cover up.” To me, it’s much more likely an accident happened given their behavior.