To be fair in this instance, this is a wild story that does have all the hallmarks of a wacky conspiracy theory straight out of a Bond film. Some secret Chinese laboratory is doing some secret stuff with some super spreading disease and then whoops it gets leaked and shuts the entire world down.

Also keep in mind where the info was coming from in the US: it was being introduced by Trump. This is someone who regularly spouses countless baseless conspiracies whenever he needs some sort of ammunition to blame a group he doesn't like. There is plenty of fair reasons to not have believed this story.

As an American progressive, here's how I feel about it. I have no doubt that others will have a different take.

I don't think it was tribalized by American media; I think covid hit when much of the world, not least the US, was embroiled in tribalism. I wanted to know whether it had come from a lab leak, but at the time a lot of the lab-leak rhetoric was packaged along with racist and nationalist vitriol, to the point where people who appeared to be of Asian descent were being attacked in the street.

So sensible people who suggested the virus may have come from a lab were out-shouted by people saying things like The election was stolen, Jews will not replace us, China virus, execute Fauci, being asked to wear a mask in Starbucks is like the Holocaust. I can forgive people for not wanting to try to pick out valid points from that particular torrent of bullshit. I think the resistance to the lab leak theory was less that people were dismissing science and more that the zone had been flooded and they were up to their neck in it.

> American media

Huh? The previous President of the US frequently called it the "China Virus".

> GOP conspiracy to bring down Biden

Biden wasn't President for the first year of the pandemic, not sure how that works out.

> Are American progressives so fragile in their identity that they avoid agreeing with conservatives for fear of guilt by association?

I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or natural. It bares next to zero importance on my life. At the end of the day what are we really arguing about? Lab practices in China? The Chinese should be better about lab safety and wet markets. But there was a pandemic which has killed millions of people. It seems like the people most invested in this question are also the ones most invested in downplaying the pandemic, which is just evil.

> anti-science tribalism

I don't know what you mean by this. The Science said it wasn't a lab-leak, and we trust The Science, so it couldn't have been anti-science.

The source of the problem is all the terrible leaders, whether they be the media, politicians, etc. You've focused solely on the "media", but a large part of the anti-science tribalism flowed from the infantile president trying to point the finger at anyone else, rather than accepting the existence of and dealing with the problem. When that much nonsense is being pumped into the zeitgeist, priors get massively screwed up - anything resembling the nonsense is dubious, so anything opposing the nonsense is duvious, and so on.

Also it's not particularly appropriate to use the label "conservative" for those trying to buck societal institutions. The actually conservative position was to follow public health advice.