The pathological human obsession with narratives such as this often does more harm than good.
No useful investigation can now occur. No punishment can be meted out. Any lessons learned from one origin or another can be learned now regardless.
Deliberate LLH: China (or, if you’re in China, the US) developed a weapon and essentially released it on the world. This hypothesis basically tells us nothing because we’ll never actually validate or invalidate it. There’s also no mitigation for future leaks because if it were deliberate you can always deliberately do it again. Also, it probably does have racist/xenophobic/propagandist motive pushing it along at various levels. Even if this were true it doesn’t matter because we’re obviously not going to nuke cities or cut off trade or roll tanks or hang leaders in response.
Accidental LLH: Hypothesis goes that there was gain of function research and a sample accidentally escaped the lab. This is actually pretty likely, but has the interesting feature of it not mattering whether it’s true in this particular instance. Regardless of whether COVID-19 itself fits this, COVID-19 indicates that GOF research should be banned! There is no need for collaboration-harming “repercussions” (or cries for repercussions, since they’ll never happen anyway).
Deliberate LLH: Doesn’t matter if it’s true because 1) we’ll never know and 2) even if it we’re true, no one could do anything about it.
Accidental LLH: Doesn’t matter if it’s true because 1) we’ll never know and 2) even if it were false, the correct course of action is to ban/mitigate GOF research.
It’s a complete shame that these have not been better distinguished from one another.
Or maybe to put it another way: it’s evident that at least when people think they’re responding to the lab leak hypothesis, they’re responding to a deliberate release scenario. IMO people have deliberately muddied the conversation because if you muddy it one direction you get to imply malice on China’s part, and if you muddy it in the other direction you get to clear China of incompetence.
But in any case, not only are we not going to prove or fix malice or incompetence, it doesn’t actually require either to yield COVID-19 or COVID-19-like pandemics anyway. That’s where the conversation should be.
In any case, you will get no such evidence, so society should proceed as if evidence is in hand, if such is even theoretically possible.
This is precisely what I am talking about.
Act accordingly.
Knowing the exact sequence of events that led to the pandemic is extremely important, and not only as research for future pandemics. There is reasonable doubt that the Wuhan lab had something to do with the virus. I'm measuring my words carefully here because we don't have incriminating evidence. But there has been enough material published over the last 2 years to warrant suspicion.