Depending on the official, the CCP also seems to be maintaining that SARS-CoV-2 didn't originate naturally in China either, thus their (entirely unsupported) frozen food theory and push for sampling in other SE Asian countries. So I again see plenty of reason to dislike the CCP, but little specific to actual lab vs. non-lab origin.

I'm absolutely not saying the origin doesn't matter for anything--if 2.9M people died due to a particular class of research, then that absolutely should affect our judgment as to whether that research should be funded or permitted (though that cost/benefit tradeoff seems grossly unfavorable to me regardless). The link between that question and China's perceived culpability just seems bizarrely overstated to me, divorced from the reality that the USA was entirely supportive of that research pre-pandemic.