China has no problem blaming other countries for SARS-CoV-2 - they tried to blame the US for it, claiming it was brought into China in frozen food and the hand-picked World Health Organisation panel said nothing - but their willingness to retaliate is clear. So clear that a panel of experts worried that even discussing the possibility of an accidental leak was cautioned against because it might risk "international harmony."

A Wellcome Trust email from Dr. Jeremy Farrar, current director of the Wellcome Trust and former Oxford professor, stated on February 2 2020 that a likely explanation for the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was a leak from one of the nearby labs in Wuhan.

The science world knows that the 'biosecurity' rating of labs in China is whatever they want to claim, much different from the US where the BSL is serious business. In China, they may be BSL-2 or whatever when a communist party official is visiting, but the rest of the time no one knows. Just a short while earlier, a scientist there was convicted of selling lab animals to the same Wuhan wet market where the pandemic originated. 

No one claims they did it on purpose, but whether the US should have been funding such important work in a country known for lazy protocols is a valid topic. And China know they were probably involved. You don't delete an entire database of coronavirus samples, vaporize the wet market nearby, and stall the World Health Organisation request to visit for 9 months - and then only let the team leader China picked be in the lab for 4 hours but ask no questions they did not approve - if you know you are free of blame.

How did the scientists who received the email from Ferrar, including US scholars who served under at least three administrations, respond? They said a discussion was a bad idea because conspiracy theorists might target China for blame. Then various groups did everything they could to suppress revealing the email saying that they needed to suppress debate.

Which means conspiracy theorists got what they wanted, evidence of governments and NGOs suppressing debate for geopolitical reasons. Which led to the "great potential harm to science and international harmony” they thought they would avoid by dismissing an honest discussion about how COVID-10 came to be.