That is to say, is there an actual person who is perfectly fine with all the terrible things the CCP plainly does, but finding out that they've been incompetently handling research will suddenly make them change their views?
If anything it seems like you would agree that in the absence of evidence humility is appropriate. People who acted like only fringe conspiracy theorists would even consider lab origins should reflect on their overconfidence and arrogance. It’s not a slam dunk either way and probably never will be, if i had to guess.
Just look at what an investment in BioNTech would have done if you bought in October 2019:
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BNTX:NASDAQ?window=5Y
You'd be 25x in less than 2 years.
How convenient for the Gates Foundation to invest $55 million in September 2019! https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...
The chief innovation of mRNA vaccines is that instead of using expensive egg cultures, you can reproduce viral proteins inside the vaccinated patient themselves. This presumably means much cheaper manufacturing.
Additionally, you can drive long-term vaccine sales, since antibodies based on a single protein (spike) are more likely to fail compared to immunity based on the complete protein structure. We're already seeing this now with the 'need' for booster shots in response to variants driven by these leaky vaccines.
But we’ve known since the COVID outbreak that there was experiments making novel corona viruses infect humanized mice in Wuhan just before two of the WIV researchers got sick and a nearby military event also got sick. We’ve further known that COVID-19 has a DNA structure unlike natural viruses — matching a bat virus except for a single protein that appears to be from a pangolin virus.
It was always clear the preponderance of evidence pointed towards a lab leak — and that claims of a natural virus were special pleading by interested parties or a political stunt by media parties.
You were always irrational and acting based on propaganda to question a lab leak — it was the only reasonable and supported-by-evidence hypothesis the entire time.
Is the default to simply assert that, because it is biological, it naturally evolved? In the modern era we're in, I'm not convinced that is a sensible default.
The most sensible default is to say we don't know, and all reasonable possibilities are being explored. That is not the same as saying that its reasonable and responsible to downplay a completely reasonable theory; for all that's holy, the virus was first discovered in the same city as China's only L4 biohazard lab studying human pathogens, literally that evidence alone is enough to say the lab-leak theory is "reasonable". Not a smoking gun! But REASONABLE and not worthy of downplay.
Sure, maybe the CCP screwed up containment, and that mistake cost millions of lives. Every single major government around the planet has facilities like the one we're discussing. Every single one has made mistakes like the CCP possibly did. The CCP were just unlucky in that their mistake wasn't confined to one person or the welcome lobby.
Knowing it was engineered in a lab would put a bigger spotlight on facilities like these. Unfortunately, its most likely to only result in sanctions against China, but if the people in charge could summon an ounce of sense, it could also mean more of these facilities being shut down, their research suspended, and the live cultures of humanity-destroying plagues in their vaults destroyed.
The basis for GoF research (at least, the publicly-espoused thesis, bioweapons research being a likely secondary interest) is that such research can help us stop or reduce the impact of a pandemic. If the natural origin theory turns out to be the truth, then this adds lots of weight to the idea that we SHOULD be aggressively pursuing GoF research in order to fix the next naturally-occuring viral pandemic. However, if sars-cov-2 actually came from a lab leak, then we have evidence that such research is both far more risky than we thought and as well that natural pandemics are less likely than we think, so we should probably not do it at all.
... which is a critical thing to consider when reading virologists' opinions claiming that it couldn't be a lab leak. There is a very obvious conflict of interest here.
I don't have a good answer how to deal with this conflict, since it is hard for non-virologist to judge the arguments, but ignoring the conflict of interest entirely is not the solution.
The most likely explanation is that the lab was engaging in risky scientific research, because they wanted to do ground-breaking science and were asking themselves whether they could, not whether they should.
Then they made a mistake, had a gap in the protocols, didn't follow them out of laziness, or some other accident, and infected themselves.
As attractive as such theories sound, pandemics are unpredictable enough that noone sane would start one to further some specific goal. At a large scale, there are rarely true winners in a pandemic (or war).
Unless you’re a creationist, then yes?
Coronaviruses have never been easy to contain. Not this one, nor any of the many other coronaviruses that have been endemic in humans for thousands of years.
We call the common cold common for a reason.
Evidence is a method of confirmation. Motives, incentives and suspicious evasions can help us form hypotheses to evaluate. Dismissing a hypothesis as something unworthy of examination may fall under the 'suspicious evasion' subheading.