Then the title of the article is highly misleading.
Using "Scientists" instead of "Some scientists" implies that the great majority of the scientists believed in this hypothesis, and there is no evidence for that.
Also, the scientists with the most power were the ones doing the misleading. For whatever reason, the power structure has been such that the scientists willing to mislead are elevated to positions where they are given the opportunity to mislead the most people, and not challenged by other scientists^1 like you would expect in a community dependent on debate to find the truth.
And it's not as if this is leading to a substantial change in the community. If we're being honest, scientists with positions of power are just as likely to mislead us in the future when they believe the truth might be harmful to their funding.
I don't have a strong opinion about what happened, it may or may not be a lab leak. It's still ongoing and I feel it will be a very long and sterile debate with few scientific facts to prove anything.
Granted, if the title of the article was "Scientists believed that Covid had natural origins...", this article wouldn't attract my attention as much, because I already believe that to be the popular opinion. But if, in this hypothetical title, "Scientists" only represented a minority of scientists, it would still be a very misleading title.
Yes, some scientists did and they didn't want speculation and suppressed the fact with political means. There were other scientists that did entertain the thought publicly and they were branded as being anti-science. Just for entertaining the thought, not for saying the had any conclusive evidence.
Did you notice though that the lab leak in mainstream media was stated as being conclusively not a lab leak - not even potentially? That's what I saw, only relatively recently did the tune change.
Oddly enough the mainstream media I saw stated that it was conclusively a lab leak, orchestrated by the democrats, in conjunction with soros, gates, leftists, globalist and the CCP. There was zero potential that it could be anything else at all, or that even one of the supposed conspiring parties was not involved.
That's one of the tough parts about headline interpretations because you're right. I think editors use it as a sort of con knowing it can leave them with a way out. Here's an NPR headline using the same term that could be seen as just as misleading:
I think if you qualify every bit of a statement, it comes off as verbose, which mollifies the impact. If you have half a brain, you should know that it means "some scientists" not "all scientists". I suppose it's normal to read absolutes into things you know nothing about or are unwilling to invest thought into. Then the ambiguity leads to lots of pointless quibbles.
Is your assumption that all firefighters were involved in the rescue?