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When you hear hooves, think horses not zebras.

All throughout history viruses have spread from close animal contact with humans. Including—and I cannot stress this enough—a novel coronavirus circa 2002 that spread from bat to intermediary host to humans in a wet market in the very same country.

In comparison, for the lab leak you’re assuming a lab accident (rare), that it wasn’t noticed and quarantined immediately (even rarer), and that the wet market still randomly became the epicenter of early cases despite at that point the transmission being human to human (rare, there’d be no reason for it to be any more significant than any other place people gather).

So when we’ve never seen a significant outbreak from a lab accident (zebras) and throughout all of human history we’ve seen viruses spread to humans from close contact with animals (horses)… yes when there is ambiguity to what the cause is, defaulting to what we’ve always seen before—including literally just 20 years ago—is simpler.

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Lab accidents may be rare in general, but the lax safety at Wuhan had already [0] been noted two years prior.

The horse/zebra analogy is not so convincing within miles of a zebra breeding farm, with fences reported to be weak. Near this place, such assumptions don't carry their normal weight.

[0] https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_chinese-lab-chec...