It's an overused example, but it's a good one. Flying is extremely safe. Not because it's an inherently safe activity, but because every time something happens we stop and ask why. We don't accept simple answers like "the pilot screwed up" we try to find all of the root causes and contributing factors. Then for each of those we try to find a mitigation to avoid the problem in the future.
It's not unreasonable to want to know what caused this pandemic so we can try to avoid the next one.
And you don't see a problem with this?
You seem to assume the lab-leak hypothesis assumes malicious intent in creating the virus, but most people are actually concerned about negligence and/or a malicious coverup of the origin.
A definitive answer to the origin of covid could help answer the following questions:
- How much do I trust U.S. public health institutions?
- How much do I trust Chinese public health institutions?
- Should gain-of-function and other high-risk virus research be conducted? And what should the safety standards be of such research?
- Is there a problem of forced consensus/centralization in the broader scientific community?
If a plane crash killed a few hundred people, no one would question the need for a thorough investigation, root cause analysis, and preventative measures for the future. Or consider the security reforms put in place after 9/11, which killed thousands. This pandemic killed millions.
For sure we should use this as a lesson to increase safe guards regardless. But discussing those measures would require actual domain specific knowledge, so you’ll never see it on HackerNews (to speak nothing of Twitter!)
Increasing safeguards relies on us knowing what the vectors of outbreak are. It matters if this was caused by an underpaid lab assistant selling animals that were meant to be contained, or a random person catching animals to sell, or a researcher that didn't quarantine after being bit. The safeguards should be different.