The censorship of the Chinese government being best explained under the lab leak than under the natural zoonosis hypothesis, it belongs to the list of evidence that enhance the plausibility of the former.
What are the existing evidence for zoonosis?
Is it the ones given by the proximal origin paper?
Here what virologist Simon Wain-Hobson said in an interview for a German newspaper:
Should “The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2” be retracted?
Yes. Absolutely. The same goes for the Lancet article (Calisher et al., 2020). These papers weren’t genuine scientific contributions. They served a narrative, not the data. But retractions are rare because they seem like an admission of guilt. Authors usually retract their articles voluntarily—almost no one is forced to do so. And these papers were published in Nature Medicine and The Lancet—you don’t want that to be lost from your resume.
It’s not about punishment. It’s about responsibility. Anyone who has misled the world during a pandemic shouldn’t be allowed to simply disappear quietly. You have to retract. And admit mistakes.
What role did the major journals—Nature, Science, The Lancet—play?
They are part of the scientific establishment. They want to stay close to NIH directors and major funders. They haven’t published lab-theory articles, supposedly because of a lack of hard data—but they were quick to publish weak papers supporting the natural hypothesis.
Is it the paper by Worobey et al?
Here is a peer review paper arguing that this paper is flawed.
https://academic.oup.com/jrsssa/article/187/3/710/7557954