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It's easy to prove that covid caused millions of deaths. Go ahead and prove that climate change has done the same. Plus all the oil scientists, coal workers, car owners etc are in the billions themselves. They have massively diluted responsibility, at worse they may each deserve a speck in the eye for the equivalent of decades of medieval torture of covid guy.
IS it? There are many causes of so-called Covid deaths; very few people die of Covid alone. You need pulmonary co-morbidities like smoking; like decreased immune function; like the social pathology of Western medical praxis at keeping Grandma around, medicated up to the gills, long past her sell-by date already. Africa hardly had any Covid deaths, because they don't do the last one.
Saying "Covid is responsible for millions of deaths" is like packing someone's port authority warehouse with ammonium nitrate for years and then putting all responsibility for the inevitable explosion on "The unseasonable heat that day was responsible for 7000 deaths".
The spark doesn't cause the inferno; the kindling does. A novel bat virus is only a spark.
African countries are piss-poor at tracking COVID deaths. Their death rates from disease are an order of magnitude higher than ours, so excess mortality statistics are going to be very noisy. Yes, a lot of the deaths were in people that were already vulnerable as hell from old age or diabetes or smoking or something. Let's call that 90 percent of 'em. We still have 10 percent of the dead that would have lived for at least a decade or so in the absence of COVID.
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People very concerned about climate change will easily assert enormous costs due to climate change. I'm sure they could cook up scary death tolls if they needed to in order to justify punishing their enemies.
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It's easy to prove that COVID-19 caused megadeaths, but it isn't easy to prove that it started from a lab leak. My out-of-posterior probability on "The COVID-19 pandemic began with a leak from the WIV" is 60%. People who I trust not to be enstupidated by the culture war and who have understood the evidence on both sides and updated on it use words consistent with posterior probabilities in the 10-49% range. "The COVID-19 pandemic began with a leak from the WIV of a pathogen deliberately engineered as part of a gain of function programme for which identifiable US persons can be blamed" is obviously even less likely because of conjunction.
Even if COVID-19 wasn't a lab leak, it could have been. That is sufficient to make gain-of-function research into pathogenic viruses a universal jurisdiction capital offence going forward, but it isn't enough to punish the people who did it when it was legal.
The call to start punishing people for the COVID-19 lab leak without confirming that it actually happened is a call to punish people based on any conspiracy or cock-up theory which is at least as plausible as the lab leak theory and ends with megadeaths. FWIW, my out-of-posterior probability on "Climate change will kill more than a million people in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2050" is 80% - we know that some non-zero amount of climate change is real, that Sub-Saharan Africa was too hot already, and that it doesn't take that much to cause a million deaths in the third world. My out-of-posterior probability on "Cigarette marketing during the period where tobacco company executives knew that smoking caused cancer but publically denied this caused increased cigarette consumption leading to over a million worldwide cancer deaths" is 95%.
Given the politics of all this, it will be the tobacco executives who are first against the wall if we adopt this policy. I suspect that at least one wholly innocent group (vaccine manufacturers, Monsanto employees, water flouridators etc.) will be targetted before the mob gets round to the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
More seriously, part of the purpose of trials and such-like is that they affect the deterrent message that the following punishment sends. If the De Santis administration gets the Supreme Court to ignore the Bills of Attainder clause and terror-tortures Fauci for funding gain of function research in Wuhan, the actual lesson learned is "Don't do anything which might upset a noisy minority of partisan voters enough that they call for your head" which cashes out as "Don't do anything at all" because partisan rage-machines are fairly unpredictable. Even if you do prove that Fauci-funded research engineered the virus which escaped from WIV, if he is the only person you terror-torture with e.g. tobacco industry executives skating then you are sending the same message.
To send the message "Don't do stuff that has an obvious risk of a megadeath cock-up", you need to make the risk of being terror-tortured depend more on the severity of the cock-up than the political valence of it.
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