[lbeltrame]

To be fair, some scientists made fools of themselves and their (and mine!) profession when speaking to the media. And most of the time journalists treated them as infallible priests handing down absolute truths (like when someone mistook relative risk reduction for proportion of patients responding to a drug... in an EU national newspaper). I even saw falsehoods (yes, falsehoods) on immunity appearing on mainstream papers ("Omicron bypasses vaccines" - totally false): at some point I thought my immunology textbooks would self-combust.

More on topic, even though I tend towards the natural origin hypothesis, there's not enough evidence to show that it is the only possible idea, and that at least a leak (I think bioengineering is far less likely) is possible.

And personally I think (of course, that's just my opinion) the whole debate is there due to the Fauci controversy about GoF research, not necessarily about the actual virus.

Shutting down debate like this was never a good idea and in fact reinforced the conspiracy theory supporters. Because people are people, and despite the uncertainty, they started treating lack of evidence as "facts".