I'm trying to be a good bayesian reasoner here but the particulars of this specific case are all so tangled and piecemeal. The conspiracy theorists among us are having an absolute field day with the current events and it's easy to see why.
According to my bayesian analysis, I believe that the most likely cause of this virus is a wet-market infection, followed by a slip-up at a lab, with—by high margin, in very very last place at, say, 1% probability, that this was concocted by a nefarious player (the CCP being a favorite candidate). The conspiracy theorists (my Facebook friends especially) seem to rank the likelihood of this list in reverse (i.e. clearly this was concocted by the chinese government). With how secretive and disingenuous the CCP is even on a good day, it's easy to see why their argument has a few credence points (like any good conspiracy).
But I can't reconcile that there's not much for the CCP to gain on the world stage by releasing this thing. The US was already so politically tumultuous, and the 2016 Russian disinformation campaign was so much more effective at breaking our democracy apart, with the added benefit of not sending our economy into a global recession as a byproduct. What has the CCP gained here? Xi's power as a leader has only weakened, and their position as the world's factory is now only slipping faster.
So this is kind of like 9/11 to me. The people who would be the most likely to profiteer off a tragedy like this would have not in any capacity been able to pull it off, and the ones who are powerful or otherwise sophisticated enough to pull it off don't have much incentive to anyways. So that's why bayesian reasoning leads me to believe that yes, we know these viruses jump from animals to humans from time to time, and this seems to likely be one of those instances. What am I missing?