Right, maybe this will explain it. All the predictions you are bringing up were NOT predicting anything as severe as what has happened. They were all referring to the normal kind of pandemic that happens regularly, which is often (Ibut not always) a coronavirus, and often (but not always) from China.
That’s why the Chinese were researching it in the first place. A Chinese lab researching coronaviruses is like a California lab researching earthquakes, or a Florida lab researching hurricanes. It’s something that happens regularly, it’s never good, and every once in a while it’s really really bad. So it makes perfect sense to research it and try to find ways to prevent it and to mitigate the damage when it happens.
Nobody could have predicted that this particular episode would be as bad as it has been, any more than anyone can predict that the next San Francisco earthquake will be The Big One. But everyone knows that some kind of earthquake will happen soon, and everyone knows that The Big One will come one day. So when it does come, will you point to everyone who was talking about earthquake preparedness and accuse them of having engineered it?!