We haven't found an animal host for SARS-CoV-2 yet, after more than 12 months. It took six months to find an animal host for SARS and less than a year for MERS. The incentive for the Chinese government to find a SARS-CoV-2 animal host is much much higher than for either of those viruses. Failure to find the host is not proof of lab origin, but the longer the search goes on unsuccessfully, the more the probabilities shift.
> 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.
We've already found animal hosts for SARS-COV2, be haven't found the origin animal.
It took two years to find the bats as likely source and another twelve to find the specific species and location, the horseshoe bat.
For MERS we only know that dromedary camels are a major reservoir host for MERS-CoV and an animal source of MERS infection in humans. The exact role of dromedaries in transmission of the virus and the exact route of transmission is unknown.
AFAIK we have found that SARS-CoV-2 can infect certain animals but no-one has found it in any animals that are plausible candidates for the original zoonotic transfer. (If such candidates have been found, I'd like to learn about it!) For SARS and MERS we had identified candidates already by this stage.
> 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.
> 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.