There's now a lot of evidence suggesting that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, was an engineered pathogen that leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
There's still an unsolved question of where it was engineered and which Wuhan lab it escaped from.
The mainstream lab-leak theory tends to assume it was engineered in and leaked from Shi Zhengli's lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Linfa was supervisor of Dr. Danielle Anderson, known as Dani and dubbed the "Last and only foreign scientist in the Wuhan lab." Dani was based on and off at the WIV in the high-security BSL4 lab and her role in DEFUSE was to test the creations of American virologists like Ralph Baric on the bats held at the WIV. So, one scenario consistent with this is that, upon publication of the genome sequence, Linfa realised the virus was his - which is to say, an EcoHealth Alliance research product from the US that Dani was testing in the WIV's BSL4 lab - and notified Beijing, triggering the shift to a biosecurity response.
Other scenarios are available of course, such as a leak from Shi's lab or a leak from a different lab in Wuhan, as Robert Kogon has suggested.
The apparent cluelessness of the Chinese Government until the sequence was published, and the abrupt switch afterwards to something that looks a lot like a biosecurity response, indicates the Chinese Government may have been alerted to the leak only after the sequence was published.
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