[ncmncm]

We don't know if there ever was a wild RaTG13. If WIV is under suspicion, anything WIV said about RaTG13 is equally suspect. If it is faked, one might be surprised they did not fake it in a way less likely to encourage suspicion.

Nobody seriously suspects WIV engineered the SARS-CoV2 to deliberately cause a pandemic, but negligently letting it escape is itself obviously worth covering up. Whether that happened or not, it is their misfortune that it doesn't look more like a natural chimera.

I have assumed early insistence that it was natural was considered necessary to get any possibility of cooperation from the Chinese gov't. Now that they have become uncooperative, there is no more reason to maintain the fiction.