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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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