Authored by Thomas Lifson via The American Thinker (emphasis ours)

The cover-up of the probability that COVID-19 was deliberately created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) has had profound consequences for the entire world, preventing early detection and countermeasures, as well as derailing informed research.

One key element of that cover-up was the hiding of the fact that the Wuhan lab was working on bats, because the virus was a variant of an existing bat-borne virus.  The cover story, that a wet market led to the dispersal of COVID-19, would have looked awfully weak had it been known that the WIV was creating new viruses from bats.  Both the World Health Organization and Peter Daszak, who acted as an investigator for WHO, outright denied that the WIV had live bats in its research facility.