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The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement.
I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus.
From the thread beginning at https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126:
"Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus:
1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market)
2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred)
3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach)
4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in)
Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it.
We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."
We're trying to groom public appetite for war with China. Anything that paints them in the worst possible light is acceptable now.
After artificial chip shortages, the weather balloon incident, and TikTok, now it's suggested China was responsible for COVID. Expect more to follow.
What gives me pause is that our collective national security apparatus saw fit to let it traverse the entire fucking country before doing anything about it. And in the end, America even acknowledged that it was blown off course-- which is what the Chinese were saying from the start.
I don't trust the Chinese-- at all. I don't trust America either though. I remember the certainty with which they said there was evidence of WMDs in Iraq.
Why some people are willing to believe the nonsense spouted by both I don't understand, but the fact that people do explains why so many view it as an intentional act by China.
The theory was on the table and was discussed at the time ...
Most efforts however were focused on dealing with the immediate danger.
You must have a very conspiratorial group of friends / contacts !
I followed the whole covid story pretty closely, and as I recall "lab leak" was taken by almost everyone as "accidental lab leak". Was the lab perhaps doing some type of "gain of function" research that they were not meant to be doing? TBD, but the massive (as it turns out) initial over-reaction to covid in China certainly doesn't look like something they intended to inflict on themselves (as well as eventually the rest of the world).