1. Gain of function research primarily uses samples collected from nature, and seeks to stimulate their evolution in as natural a way as possible to learn how viruses evolve in nature. If such viruses were to escape the lab, they would appear "natural"
2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak, because the US was itself funding gain of function research on novel coronaviruses in the Wuhan BSL4 lab
3. Lab leaks happen more often than most people realize[1]
[1]https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/3/20/18260669/deadly...
There is, from my understanding, reasonable evidence to conclude the virus was not engineered from the perspective of "we took genes from one virus and moved them to this virus," but there's no evidence disproving the idea that it was the result of gain of function research.
My personal feeling is that these statements are true:
* The virus is unlikely to have been engineered (in the way I described above) and leaked.
* There is circumstantial evidence the virus was the result of gain of function research and it leaked.
* There is circumstantial evidence the virus was a natural research sample and it leaked.
* There is circumstantial evidence the virus was introduced by an animal/person who traveled to the wet market.
Some of these are more likely than others, and an individual's own calibration for what is likely or unlikely will probably come into play more than evidence in the short term and possibly long term as well. I can say the vast majority of us are not qualified to answer the question either way though.
Of course as an Asian person, whatever people believe in will have a direct impact on me. I remember after 9/11, the amount of awful things that were said and done to the Sikh population in my city. It didn’t matter they had literally nothing to do with the attacks. People were angry and wanted someone to blame.
This absolutely shouldn't be China vs. USA, and it's deeply unfortunate that the Trump administration's early, characteristically unsupported rhetoric made it so. The WIV's safety was probably below American standards, but probably closer than a wet market is to American agricultural standards. So it's ridiculous to think a lab vs. natural origin makes it "more China's fault". If the CCP is currently covering up a lab accident, then they're probably quite unhappy that they've been "forced" to do so, and wishing in retrospect they'd instead decided a year ago to publicly blame the rogue, American-funded researcher.
Long before the pandemic, this was an obscure academic debate, between virologists who wanted to perform certain risky experiments and others who thought they presented an unacceptable risk:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097416/
With the possibility (absolutely not proven; but not disproven either) that such an experiment has just killed 2.9M people, that debate takes on a terrible new significance.