So Gain of Function research enables scientists to tinker with viruses under some very specific conditions. In the early 2010's the practice was suspended due to risk of contagion. This article announces its resumption back in 2017, but doesn't provide any contemporary context. What is implied is that once gain-of-function was available again, somewhere between between 17-19 there was a lab-engineered virus in the Wuhan lab that escaped the containment procedures and became COVID-19.

The lab was located in Wuhan strategically because it's a very central transit hub but also very close to the bat caves where thousands of coronavirus varieties are believed to emerge from. As one of the leading coronavirus focused virology labs in the world, they collaborated with universities, governments, and corporations to advance related research. Fauci's name was one the check for some US grant money connected with research that included Gain of Function practices, but again that was in the open, and one of many sponsors of this work.

The "wet market" theory is politically useful to many parties, but scientifically unlikely. There is precedent for coronaviruses crossing to humans in public markets that sell live animals, sometimes closely packed together, notably SARS. The big question is: where are all the dead bats? There has been little evidence to support any lineage between a wet market and the outbreak. It's pretty tricky because they are within walking proximity of each other.

I have no reason to think that this virus was engineered to cause a pandemic and intentionally released. Why would China use a super-virus in their own population first, right next to the wet market and coronavirus lab? Who would gain from this? Sure drug and testing companies did well, but why would they release a virus that they don't have a cure for? No one company had some monopoly on the cure- it was a global collaboration that brought forth several approaches and massive distribution/manufacturing. It wasn't some crackpot in a basement that put it together. The equipment needed to manipulate 100nm species doesn't come cheap, nor the people who know how to use them to engineer coronaviruses. None of these scenarios or others make sense to me relative to the Occam's razor version:

Despite the rigorous controls associated with level 4 gain-of-function research, cleaning procedures, airlocks, etc someone made a mistake. Maybe someone had caught their hazmat suit on loose nail that ripped a small hole, then a few minutes later some shelf fell over, knocking over a bunch of crates that shattered some virus vial. The researcher rushed to clean up the mess and forgot about their breached gear. The walk home from work, fall ill a few days later and the rest is history.

The fact is, whomever is to blame faces the weight of millions of deaths and trillions of losses of various currencies. If it's that scenario I just made up, who would be to blame? The researcher, or the facility? China didn't want to be liable for the insane damage, and it may not have been any one person or organization's fault. The GOF research was dangerous, they did it anyways, in the open, and got a lot of people killed. That was poor outcomes for a program that was intended to prevent pandemics, and there are a lot of people that could be blamed. At this point though, would anyone gain anything from a real smoking gun, other than poetic resolution?