Thanks for the supportive response...

I do want to push back on calling this theory a "conspiracy theory."

I'm not suggesting any kind of conspiracy. I think it was probably a complete accident. And another possibility is that even the CCP does not know exactly how it happened. We know local governments are given enough rope to hang themselves by the CCP. Maybe by the time central officials got involved, the evidence was destroyed or obfuscated.

As I said in the piece, some of the uncertainty around this issue are due to the lack of transparency from the CCP, but they're never transparent about anything, so I don't even think this is a COVID specific cover-up. Hence, I don't think this is a conspiracy theory. It's just the most likely observation I can come up with given the information we do have.