To answer your question before my unprompted musing, I agree. I think the majority of people won't get anything out of understanding the nitty-gritty detail of this discourse, and will spend a lot of energy fending off bipartisan "WE TOLD U SO" bickering along the way. However, appropriate authorities should keep working on the problem, even if just to determine that there's no data to get to the bottom of this at all.

> but I don't think anyone is saying that.

Part of the timeline that seems to miss from some discussions, including the article brought by the OP, is that Donald Trump did in fact make that sort of statements, on several occasions[1], even though you unlikely mean that the same way. While e.g. Cotton's words have not been treated with due rigour by some journalistic media outlets, the social media platform crackdown on the associated terms, in my memory, did happen after Trump's statements had a measurable hate crime effect.

[1] The earliest example - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-trump-...

> “But we’re going to find out. You’ll be learning in the not-too-distant future. But it’s a terrible thing that happened - whether they made a mistake or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one. Or did somebody do something on purpose?” he said.

In my subjective opinion, the conversation in general both was and still is overall chaotic, often conflating at least some of the following:

1. Natural virus transmitted from source animal. Sensible zoonosis scenario.

2. Natural virus transmitted from "incubating" animal. Sensible zoonosis, again.

3. Natural virus leaving lab due to a storage safety failure. Sensible lab accident scenario.

4. Natural virus leaving lab due to an operations safety failure. Sensible lab accident scenario.

5. Natural virus modified successfully by the lab, doing 3-4. Often deemed less likely, but nonetheless a fundamentally sensible scenario.

6. Natural virus modified successfully by the lab, intentionally released from the lab by the Chinese government. Sometimes this flavour also implies that the virus was modified not with gain-of-function research goal, but with biological warfare goals straight up. Feels the same thing on paper, but in terms of language used the latter is substantially more visceral, evoking defensive reaction. Either way, this does not make any much sense, given economic stakes. CCP may have a heavy-handed enforcement of their interests, but they count their own money better than anyone else.

7. Artificially created virus, doing a 3 or 4. Sometimes with intentionality implication. There doesn't seem to be any significant research supporting this as a plausible scenario.

8. Intentionally (to harm the proverbial West) designed artificial virus, doing a 6. Straight up Tom Clancy's book material.

I've seen "lab leak" applied by some journalists to anything from 3 to 8 including. The problem here is that 6-8 predominantly are political rallying calls for a base eager for a confrontation with China, potentially to detract from anticipated fallout from the domestic containment effort. Much easier to say "woe betide us, this sophisticated oriental bioweapon", than to say "well we have this entire government agency designed to handle this, but everything we've done has fallen flat". The end result of this final bunch of theories was a spike of anti-Asian hate crimes, e.g., someone in my town got imprisoned for anti-Chinese hatred incitement. The last case like that in my memory was in the noughts.