So again, I ask - even if it's true, so what? It's impossible to conclusively prove, and even if proven what exactly is proven? That an accident occurred? OK, so what?
The article attempts to answer this:
> The vitriol also obscures a broader imperative, Relman says, which is that uncovering the virus’s origins is crucial to stopping the next pandemic. Threats from both lab accidents and natural spillovers are growing simultaneously as humans move steadily into wild places and new biosafety labs grow in number around the world. “This is why the origins question is so important,” Relman says.
However the reality is from the perspective of the USA it doesn't even matter. Even if China was malicious and deliberately sent it off to us, it could've been easily stopped but we didn't do it. Unless we're going to go to war over this it seems like a pointless exercise as conclusive evidence will never emerge as it requires cooperation from China.
We're worrying about whether it was created from labs in China, meanwhile we couldn't even prevent a massive superspreader event in Boston via the Biogen conference, filled with people who already has an awareness of the virus to begin with.
Even now as I type this cases of the variant are increasing and the amount of people taking the vaccine is decreasing and silly accidents like the J&J fiasco are occurring. Not to say that we can't explore both things simultaneously, but it's pretty obvious that the return on investment will differ - one will do... what exactly? And another will prevent more cases.
Another point: just because there's some uncomfortable conflict over the investigation doesn't mean we should abandon and investigation, in fact it probably means we should investigate more vigorously.
What difference does it make? Let's say that it's both lab-grown and wild game. OK, so that means we should scrutinize both. OK, then. Now what?
No amount of scrutiny can prevent an accident from occurring. It's not as if this pandemic happens every year. We're talking about a once in a century event. Not to mention some countries prevented the virus from spreading within their own countries very effectively, and others, well, did not.
Prior to that, people did get sick, and public investigations were mounted to pinpoint the problem. Nobody wanted to admit to themselves that they were to blame, that they had hurt or killed someone, but the society benefited from the momentary discomfort and those hard truths.
The situation is more like you're McDonalds and everyone at your store and your competitors stores are getting food poisoning.
Instead of properly understanding why contaminated food is arriving at your store and stopping the poisoning within your store, you're researching whether or not the contaminated food originated at Burger King.
It's not bad to research whether or not the contaminated food originated at Burger King, but regardless knowing that isn't going to stop the food poisoning from spreading within your store.
I like this analogy because there are already food safety laws just like how there are safety standards for working within a lab. Regardless, accidents happen, and people get poisoned. Kind of like the Chipotle outbreaks.
If you buy tacos from Chipotle and they sell you a tainted taco on accident. You get sick. Hopefully you survive. In any case you will want Chipotle to do a thorough investigation to prevent it from happening again.