The most likely explanation is that someone decided that the rest of the world would also blame the US government as a whole... so it was best to cover the whole thing up.
But why would the US intelligence community cover for Beijing, which would clearly bear the chief blame for cooking up a plague and then unleashing it on an unsuspecting world?
Their motive is obvious enough: Since they'd funded related (at least) research at that Wuhan lab, they feared a backlash - against them personally, and/or against such research and its funding.
The purpose of every US intelligence agency is to provide the best possible information up the chain of command, so the president and his chosen representatives can make the best possible decisions.
Collection
[
|
...
]