Come on, man. You must be joking. Why do you think NIH was doing gain of function research in Wuhan and not Maryland or Arizona?

Keeping those secret labs under the aegis of the DoD and far beyond the borders of the USA gave the US plausible deniability - but not just that.

As I mention in my article, having the labs in Ukraine meant that the US government, its contractors and its personnel could be "held harmless" and shielded from all liability - something that could never happen in the USA.