It's not a "trope". Several papers ended up getting censored, and local samples getting destroyed. I was around and combing through the news stream at that time. Project Evidence was the group of people collating the circumstantial evidence around it, and I've seen a notable dearth of material that doesn't smell of some level of having been contrivance to put the field of virology squarely outside the crosshairs of the public's ire, or having been motivated by plausible geopolitical motivations or face saving measures.
If you look at the locality of happenstance, the lab escape is more than worth looking into. Just because search engines are bombing anything with regard to it to the bottom of search results, and press farms are working hard at propagating the zoonotic origin without touching on any of the impracticalities inherent to making that full set of connections feasible does not mean the information is not out there to be found.
I think you’re just engaging in conspiracies here.
It’s possible that China’s central CDC ordered the local samples to be destroyed, because the local facility was not authorized or equipped, to handle infectious diseases properly.
Think of it this way. Do you want junior high school kids, handling contaminated biowaste, where the probability or risk of infection is very high.
And this was at the very beginning, when the science behind this virus and disease was not fully known.
It’s safer to throw the samples into a fire furnace, than to risk transporting it or storing it, where its leakage could further infect more people.
If you look at the locality of happenstance, the lab escape is more than worth looking into. Just because search engines are bombing anything with regard to it to the bottom of search results, and press farms are working hard at propagating the zoonotic origin without touching on any of the impracticalities inherent to making that full set of connections feasible does not mean the information is not out there to be found.