It feels like the kind of narrative that could lead to destabilization and may be fueled by xenophobia.
But beyond the responsible adults there are few people in the world that can study the genome and they never really had internal consensus. They had internal consensus to downplay the 'its made in a lab' conclusion, but there is no clear evidence of the opposite.
Keep in mind at that moment in time this would give ammunition to general public to harass random asian looking individuals.
You can imagine that's a not a conclusion you want to exist in the head of your common hooligan.
You can also imagine that most people convinced of anything are just, ehm, idiots. Because if you can't do the science yourself, or if you can't but haven't, it would be foolish to believe any kind of consensus where most of the people talking also can't or haven't done the science themselves. The majority is always wrong, and scientific consensus of a new event becomes insightfully about 10 years in after a few revolutions of ideas like the one currently happening.
It is in the end just a economic system of gatekeeping by a cabal. A cabal very much in a situation of economic dependency on political structures. So there can't be a scientific consensus about this in the media. Only a political one.
A common error or misrepresentation seemed to be conflation of "lab escape" with "man made." They're not the same thing; a virus from nature (smallpox etc.) could still escape from a lab.
That's certainly a type of lying, but perhaps not an extremely willful kind. Making false statements because you wholeheartedly believe them to be true is still lying, perhaps wholly unbeknownst to the speaker.
It would seem that we're collectively dialing back to "origin still inconclusive" instead of kneejerk "definitely NOT criminal negligence by $COUNTRY".
That appears reasonable, and probably would have been the original take if not for all of the extreme anti-China agitprop that is the norm seemingly everywhere in the USA's mass media these days.
TBH the source does not matter one bit, any more than the identity of Satoshi. Covid is here and must be addressed as it exists; the origin story is just narrative fuel. People eat that irrelevant shit up, because we're still basically "They did WHAT? to WHOM?!" narrative-obsessed little monkeys.
I feel the exact opposite. If the source of exposure ended up being proven to be lab-leak (beyond a reasonable doubt), I would want to understand how it happened and what measures needed to be taken to prevent this event re-occuring, even if it only occured due to gross-negligence and not malice.
It's worth examining what caused a confluence of information sources to aggressively discredit a theory they are now presenting as plausible, and how they are handling what seems like a dramatic shift in perspective, as well as the causes for the shift.
Moreover, it's worth considering how we can better analyze and verify news media and other information sources. I notice many errors and misrepresentations in areas where I have personal knowledge and expertise, but I tend to accept news reports at face value in areas where I have little expertise or knowledge.
Organisations and people will happily go with their side's narrative, regardless of scientific accuracy. Most likely, in this specific case, there was a political reason to save the face of the Chinese Communist party (who omitted information, so it's likely at fault here); someone probably got paid in some form, circulated fake news and the rest of the media / political machine just repeated their side's safe source.
This is why you can't just "trust the experts" and that's why the scientific process is a continuous work in progress which needs multiple people thinking and debunking each other.
Sure, the experts consensus is a safe default - certainly safer than believing random individuals saying the opposite on the internet - but experts can be wrong and conspiracy theories sometimes turn out to be true.