> it was and will always have been the correct call to ignore the speculation about how the virus might have come from the Wuhan virology institute.
No, it was not the correct call, because it means that possibility was not investigated when it should have been.
Wuhan is in China, and the government there is relatively unfazed by social media excitement in other countries. It would not have changed a thing.
In early 2020, literally the only thing the story had going for it was that it was more exciting than the alternative, and that it made China look bad. That absolutely is the kind of story you ignore. I'm sure you remember those were heady times, and there was a lot of bullshit to sift through. Some of that bullshit we still have to deal with today.
Based on what we know now, we shouldn't discount the possibility of some involvment of the lab, but that is absolutely not the same thing as believing that it was responsible, or even that the virus was made in some research programme.
I really wish we would see a little bit more of the cool professionalism that you often see in air crash investigations, where everybody understands that assigning blame before the facts are known is quite likely to make you look like a fool later on, and will hurt people for no reason.
I'm not a biologist so I don't really know what any of this means, but there seems to be debate around the presence of a "furin site" [0], which apparently could have emerged naturally, but also could have been artificially spliced in the course of gain-of-function research. Is that how GOF research is normally conducted? I don't really know anything here, but at least some people believe there are genetic markers indicating potential lab manipulation, thus adding another datum in the long list of circumstantial evidence.
[0] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1266805310313967617.html
This article already starts with a false dichotomy: "I missed the furious initial skirmish in what’s become the Long Discourse Wars over the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than originating naturally in bats."
Those aren't conflicting hypotheses. If you're having a "war" over that question you need a cold shower and to go offline for a bit. If the institute was somehow involved in spreading the virus, the simplest story is still that they got it from bats. No matter what anyone tells you, there is zero evidence that any part of the virus is engineered (and it isn't even entirely clear what such evidence would look like, in general!).
Either way, no new hard information has become available. The only thing that has changed is we've gone from pure, wild speculation based on the mere existence of the Wuhan virology institute, to wild speculation paired with some suggestive, anecdotal reports that need to be investigated further.
I would agree that this has somewhat changed the probabilities that we should assign to different hypotheses about the origins of the virus, but it's way too early to have strong convictions.
In the absence of any evidence, and in the heated climate of early 2020, it was and will always have been the correct call to ignore the speculation about how the virus might have come from the Wuhan virology institute.
At the present time, there's nothing you can do except hope that more facts will come to light at some point in the future, even if that's somewhat disappointing. Jumping on the story because it's so juicy and fits so great with "China bad" preconceptions is totally unnecessary.