First off -- and most amazingly -- the COVID fear porn producers would have had a much greater chance of getting people to subscribe to their fear porn and suggested remedies if people thought that COVID was some lab-birthed bioweapon from China instead of just a potentially nasty flu-bug. That these pornstars never allowed and actively punished discussion of the lab-leak theory was always the canary in the coalmine (although the summer's "it's okay to gather and riot during COVID as long as you support BLM, Antifa and other communists" bullshit was tough to beat as a tell for how fake was the COVID narrative).

Second, the villians of the story -- rather than being the Fake News-fabricated Orange Man Bad and his dastardly sidekick, Ron DeSantis -- would instead have been China and the folks who funded from and may have profited from its lab research, namely one Anthony Fauci. The scandal of China, coupled with funding from an incompetent and likely corrupt US (and international) public health bureaucracy, recklessly producing a virus like this -- and then covering up its release -- would have rivalled anything in modern history. And that assumes that the lab leak was unintentional. Had it been shown to be intentional in the investigations that would have immediately commenced -- I mean, holy shit.

The politics of it all would have been entirely in favor of Trump, who'd been a staunch critic of China from day one. (Remember that as late as February 2020, Nancy Pelosi & Co. and the entire Fake News media were still stoking racial division with propaganda calling Trump a racist for banning Chinese travel.)

Further, Anthony Fauci (and cohorts) instead of being portrayed as heroic guiding lights during COVID, would have been laughingstocks and lucky to avoid prosecution. Additionally, there would have been no political incentive for Democrats or the media to needlessly prolong the pain of COVID, as they did to get Trump, so we'd have had maybe a few weeks of lockdown and then an immediate return to normalcy once it became apparent from the stats that COVID was no big deal.

To wrap up, just a caveat. I am not saying that anything I wrote above is definitive. I'm just saying that the narrative would have been a polar opposite to what we got, so it's not remotely surprising that the powers that be censored and punished discussion of the lab leak theory from the get-go.