“It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else,” said Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing. “That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.”
While I think that so-called "conspiracy theorists" have a fairly earned reputation for jumping to conclusions before they have enough evidence to support them, that does not seem to be the case here. Early on, if you suggested that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan, China lab, not only would you be labeled pejoratively as conspiracy theorist but you would be accused of being racist. I was never really clear about the logic of that accusation. The accusation of "racist" these days seems to be a generic insult designed to shut people up.
However, at this point, there is so much evidence supporting not only a Wuhan lab origin, but also Federal funding of the gain of function research that lab performed, that you would have to be a "conspiracy theorist" to believe anything else. I mean I suppose it could be a coincidence that Ben Hu (pictured above) worked in said lab as the head researcher, researched coronaviruses, was so sick he was hospitalized at around the same time the COVID-19 outbreak started (along with two of his co-workers), that one of his symptoms was supposedly loss of smell, that he worked under a scientist nicknamed "batwoman" for her work studying viruses of bats, and that the NIAID (headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci) helped to fund Yu's research to the tune of $41 million. What do you think?