Determining how Covid started would be extremely important imo if there was a chance its release was intentional. But every virologist take I've read suggests that the virus does not look man-made. Nor would it seem that covid's effects and behavior could have possibly been known to any usable degree without the worldwide experiment that we've all been part of the last year and a half. And finally it's really hard to come up with an incentive for intentional release - assuming the suspect is China and not some Bond villain madman.
So we're left with determining if this was a possible accidental release. Which I agree is important. It's just orders of magnitude less important than determining the source of an intentional release, imo. If China accidentally released this, they screwed themselves, very hard. If it was an accidental release, and they know it, one would assume they have a strong incentive to clean up protocols in the future. If the U.S. had accidentally released something like this, they'd certainly try to cover it up, but also try to make sure it never happens again.
> If China accidentally released this then the world deserves to know what happened
"China" didn't accidentally released anything, and is easy to see why. The group of scientists that were working in Wuhan (some Chinese, other not) don't represent the government or the entire country. How they could?
Would be so absurd as to claim that "US" or "Italy" released accidentally covid-19 because a few scientists from US or Italy worked in the same project. The reason to use the words in this way and to use the mass media to fix this wrong idea in the people is 100% political and should be a red flag about the real purpose of this (gain leverage with post-truth, instead to find the truth).
The problem is that post-truth could mes enough to bury the truth forever, and all actors are interested into saving face and sneaking their own version.
We know lots about lab leaks, there have been 1000s of compromising incidents over the years. Each one is a lottery ticket. The winning lottery ticket doesn't really teach us anything that we can't learn from the losing tickets.
If it was an intentional release, obviously that's a completely different class of problem. That would be an act of war against the rest of the world, using a weapon of mass destruction, in addition to the collateral suffering of China's own population. Only very fringe groups are suggesting this was intentionally leaked to begin with. However, there's still the problem of Wuhan air travel lockdown. What possible reason was there not to lock down international travel from Wuhan when they locked down domestic travel, other than to ensure China wouldn't be alone in suffering the fallout? That alone is dangerously close to an act of war, even if the initial release was accidental. Or even if it was completely natural in origin... it really doesn't matter where it came from, that decision alone is a serious problem.
An accidental release is still the host country's responsibility, though. If that's what happened, it's important to understand how it happened to reduce the chance of it ever happening again. Such a conclusion would also lead to international demands for compensation which could put a damper on China's political and economic aspirations.
You have blinders on if "every virologist take [you've] read suggests that the virus does not look man-made." You probably formed this opinion prior to spring 2021. Before that, "trusted" authorities were all declaring that a lab leak was virtually impossible. Things have changed dramatically, with disclosure of some of Fauci's emails and a bunch of virologists now backtracking, saying they're either unsure or think the lab leak hypothesis is more likely.
Email from a virus researcher at Scripps to Fauci, early on (2020/01/31), suggested in a preliminary assessment that small portions (probably the portion of the spike protein everyone's concerned with) look potentially engineered:
wsj and nyt (2021/06): Not specifically by virologists, but two of the more mainstream articles suggest it was a lab leak, and cite evolving opinions of virologists:
Lab leak does not imply "man made" at all. Chinese virology labs are quite far from safe and stuff leaks out all the time. There's a whole lot of circumstantial evidence that this virus came from a bat to begin with and was not created in the lab.
I don't know what you mean by "man made" or "created". The origin of the vast majority of the genome of SARS-CoV-2 was a bat virus. If that makes it automatically natural in your view, you're correct by definition, but only because your definition of natural includes most modifications that could have been done in a lab.
Directed evolution in a lab (e.g. serial passage in humanized mice, or even captive bats) would be one thing. Would you consider that "man made" or "created", or is it natural?
Small genome sequence edits for experimental purposes would be another type of modification. Would you consider that "man made" or "created", or still natural?
Full genetic synthesis base pair by base pair is more difficult (longer sequences become much more difficult), but as I understand it is technologically possible... barely. If someone takes the genome from a natural virus genome sequence and synthesizes it that way in a lab, possibly with minor edits, would that be "man-made" or "created", or still natural?
So we're left with determining if this was a possible accidental release. Which I agree is important. It's just orders of magnitude less important than determining the source of an intentional release, imo. If China accidentally released this, they screwed themselves, very hard. If it was an accidental release, and they know it, one would assume they have a strong incentive to clean up protocols in the future. If the U.S. had accidentally released something like this, they'd certainly try to cover it up, but also try to make sure it never happens again.