The solution to your confusion is geopolitics. Everybody knows if it was a lab leak, we'll never know, because the CCP would never admit it. What's more, even

The solution to your confusion is geopolitics. Everybody knows if it was a lab leak, we'll never know, because the CCP would never admit it. What's more, even if it's proven to not be a lab leak, it should still absolutely prompt the reassessment of how we work with infectious diseases. The fact that such a large number of prominent scientists even think it's plausible that a cutting edge virology lab could leak a virus this deadly (and that viruses have leaked before) means this is a sector that direly needs regulation. So the rational conclusion you've drawn is basically valid whether or not there's an investigation. And since there's never going to be any proof either way, the obvious motivation for the way this has been framed and pushed is about geopolitical tensions between China and the US, which have been rising for a long time, even before COVID. I remember listening to a presentation, about a book called (pretentiously) Thucylides Trap'[0] where one particularly deranged woman was advocating for a war against China, the kicker being, she was a US military employee, a strategist, and she said multiple times that this was a normal position in the defense establishment. These morons exist, and they tend to accumulate in foreign policy and defense establishments, and the way they operate is by leaking 'intelligence documents' to the press, who then publish it just like they published the 'leaked intelligence' about Iraq twenty years ago, to awful effect. It's like the human centipede of sourcing, but instead of getting less substantial with each person the material is passed through, it gets more and more believable and concrete as it gets bounced between spooks, hacks, and quacks, even though there are no new facts, and everybody knew the whole idea was a priori irrelevant anyway.