Personally, I think the idea of this being lab created by China is far fetched.
Similar to if we had a sudden large radiation hazard and it was unclear if it was some spontaneously emerging phenomenon with essentially no direct human cause, or a power plant/enrichment facility/warhead manufacturer/etc.
And beyond that, there are supposedly methods of (even purely scientifically motivated) research that would involve engineering a virus with certain properties that also happen to make it extraordinarily deadly.
Ethics committees determine all sorts of experiments to be prohibitively unethical, and a virus with particularly deadly design should certainly be held under such scrutiny.
I tend to think China is a danger to humanity at-large, but I could be wrong. These specific events have not surprised me (new virus, spread, etc) but the sheer amount of incredulity at the behavior of countries (China, US, etc) is disheartening.
Once a guy is dead, does it matter who killed him?
If it was being developed as a biological weapon you would tend to assume there's likely progress on how to defend against it by those who created it so you could hope to leverage that work to get a head start on vaccines and so forth. No one could force China to hand that work over but they could certainly pressure them in full force, including some of their allies that may also be suffering.
Overall, there's really not much in terms of actionable information to follow through with. It might help states target spies to keep a closer eye on these scenarios and prompt a better global response in the future.
The public justification for the giant US nuclear arsenal was the entirely fictional "missile gap," thereby creating an actual missile gap in the other direction that the Soviets thought they had to close. I'm not saying that "If new coronaviruses are being cooked up in Wuhan, we'd be negligent if we weren't funding development of our own" thought processes will necessarily become ascendant, but "China is a existential threat to the world, and any expenditure is justified in order to defeat it" is absolutely common.
If a country choose not to shut its airports doesn't mean your country has to accept incoming flights. If a country thinks people are coming in with a pandemic disease and don't shut the entry points (ports/airports) that's on that country's leadership.
Just 2.4 millions as today. Not millions and millions. This is not 1918 flu levels (yet).
I've heard this multiple times as a reasonable possibility, and yet it seems absurd if you think about it: are you trying to accuse someone of leaking into the environment a virus that actually comes from the environment? And how do you even prove something like that?
You could have frontloaded manufacturing by commissioning companies to produce doses while waiting for trials. But we didn’t do that with the knowledge we had, so unclear earlier knowledge would have worked.
Trials were the big bottleneck and for that you need infected patients. So I guess if they had got a vaccine to wuhan for trials it would have sped things up, but not clear it could have been used in trials there before this all seemed serious.
"Yes, come right in, here's our primary source data collected, it concludes that Chernobyl (or WIV lab leak) did happen..."
So... murder shouldn't be punished ?
Would China really do top secret illegal bio-weapons research in a lab essentially open to the public?
Totally disagree. The political ramifications were apparent the moment the denials and information flow stopped. There's nothing more to be gained. Basic game theory.
Suddenly China's rapid detection and extreme lockdown would literally be properly contextualized as buying the world time, and the Chinese system would be validated beyond measure.