As someone who tried to follow it somewhat closely in the early days, the entirety of the lockdown debates were based on the early case fatality rate data which

As someone who tried to follow it somewhat closely in the early days, the entirety of the lockdown debates were based on the early case fatality rate data which people were unable to properly contextualize, and then later the treatment protocols changed and probably the virus itself changed, and the death rates started to plummet. So ultimately we aren't dealing with the same threat that we were. People were going off the best available data at the time, and coming up with solutions of varying quality. China may have propagandized their response as the best, in a way that was reacting to events, not orchestrating them from the beginning. This seems true even if the lab origin hypothesis is true