I worked with researchers in this space - virology + combatting future pandemics - in the decade before the pandemic. The one fact that the last 5 years never readily disclosed is that the core ideology of this community of researchers was fundamentally divided. About half of the researchers, including many leading virologists whose names appeared in the news, believed and argued passionately for the lab-based creation of super-viruses and super-bacteria. They believed that the only way to save humanity from a catastrophic pandemic was to engineer absolute nightmare bugs in the lab so that they could develop cures and vaccines. The other half of us, myself included, thought that this was pure hubris and infinitely too dangerous because humans and labs are fallible and leaks happen with surprisingly regularity. The moment that this pandemic become broad public knowledge, the portion of the community that advocated for creating these super-viruses became shockingly quiet and everyone just started to cover-their-asses and their funding.

In about 5 years it will become common knowledge that longCOVID is simply the persistance of the SARS-CoV2 virus within the human body and that there are both symptomatic versions of this disease (aka "longhaulers") and asymptomatic versions of this disease (aka, many of the so called "fully recovered"). Note that we have zero direct evidence that the virus ever leaves the body; it is just assumed because nasal swabs test negative and, for some, symptoms go away. It is a good time to invest in pharmaceutical companies that have already developed antivirals.

This is partially why I think the whole "they're conspiratorially lying to us and it was for sure a lab leak!" is a huge distraction. First, we have literally hundreds of pages of emails of scientists saying they believed (correctly or incorrectly) it was not a leak. Second, there is approximately zero chance we will ever know that it came from a lab. Third, it doesn't actually give us any more information: it could have come from any one of countless labs doing work on viruses like this.

Dangerous GoF research should be outright banned regardless!

Insofar as there is huge ambiguity in what we did or didn't know at the time, I can fault scientists for covering their own asses and their preferred research directions (which I agree are dangerous), but I can't fault them for biasing themselves against statements that leaned on the side of ambiguous that might have, at the time, literally sparked a war.