It is thoroughly unsurprising to me that most scientific publications would take a stance against releasing studies or articles considering option two or three, as right-wing media and politicians were/are fishing for anything with a suitable scientific veneer they could throw out as evidence of someone to blame. (And its not hard to see why - telling your constituents they have to deal with job losses, family deaths and lockdowns because someone in China ate a bat leaves people without something to blame, and the politicians tend to be the closest relevant people.) Given the amount of anti-asian racism/crime/murder we've seen spiking in the last year, I think the publications' stances (and the more mainstream media) to lean heavily towards option one is understandable - no one wants to be the used as justification for hate crimes or political action a la the Iraq war buildup.
Perhaps in another year or two things will have cooled down enough that stuff like this can be considered without collateral damage.
One other reason it's way too hot to discuss right now: it would suggest that scientists were at least partly to blame for the pandemic. Even if you're not Chinese, you might not want to be discussing that idea if you were a scientist yourself.
In fact it’s the opposite we need to have the hard conversations as early as possible.
The origin, truth be told, is basically irrelevant, just like the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. We live in the world today, and while the story of how we got here might be somewhat academically or historically interesting, it's about a million items down the list of things that are actually important right now.
if it did leak from a lab, we should shut these labs down.
Instead, the significant economic and health costs could have been significantly mitigated by the response of governments. That’s going to be more important for preventing harm in the next pandemic. Even if it was a lab escape, how does shutting down the labs help for the future? They are also a defence against the next pandemic
Frankly, any solution that does not in some way involve "how can we prevent or reduce the incidence of this kind of problem happening" is political nonsense to me. Even with the most effective defensive protocols, a pandemic-grade virus costs a staggering amount of resources to deal with.
So we start with one marginal conspiracy theory 4, add some lies trying to silence very likely theory 2, and as a result get even more people believing in global conspiracy to create and use the virus, who think the lies are the best proof for their theory.
Any lies are bound to backfire, and there is nothing understandable in supporting dishonesty. The Iraq war buildup is not comparable here in any way as it was a misinformation campaign started by government, not an attempt to find the truth.