The us government is motivated to attribute the outbreak to natural causes, because if the leak came from the wuhan lab, us policy and action is partially responsible. No one in power benefits from covid being the result of careless isolation protocols in GOF experimentation.

YMMV but to me the spike protein encoding on the original covid strains was just a little too close for comfort to fall into the random mutation category for my armchair opinion. I would have expected to see a non-human variant of the spike protein if it was a natural occurrence.

Either way, it is doubtful to me that we will ever know for sure.