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Because the total annual budget for a research institute will be in the tens of millions of dollars (bit of a rough guess as it's hard for me to tran, and the ecohealth alliance given to WIV was in the low 6 figures per annum if I remember correctly - most of the funding goes to American researchers. That's enough money to fund a couple of students/scientists, not even a full lab. There's maybe 45-50 professors at WIV, each with their own grants and projects. It's entirely possible that they had a completely separate project distinct from Ecohealth that involved coronaviruses/humanized mice/chimeric viruses/GoF that went poorly.
Yes, as was I. It's worth remembering that early on the evidence being cited by lab leak truthers was actual garbage that was easily refuted; the fact that people were pushing the lab leak theory in the absence of data early on gave me the strong belief that they had ulterior motives. It took a while for the case to build. The narrative isn't so cut and dried as bigoted PhDs hate internet amateurs who had mountains of evidence to make their case.
I do agree with you that Fauci did try to spike the story early. It's not clear to me whether that was out of a circling of the wagons to try and maintain support for scientific funding, whether it was trying to avoid personal culpability/scandal or something else entirely.
But...again, say you believe me for a moment that most of the relevant decisions were made by other people and rubber stamped by Fauci's office. Are you still going to obsess over Fauci, or try and understand the process that led to that decision?
"They were funding research just as dangerous as the one that could have caused the pandemic, but by dumb luck theirs was likely not involved in it" is acting fine and well intentioned?
You did not have access to the same information as Faucci, so you can be excused, even though basic critical thinking was enough to tell they were overconfident in dismissing the theory.
Why go with what the truthers were saying, instead of what Faucci and his colleagues were? Also the arguments supposedly refuting the lab leak were themselves just as easy to refute.
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