We'll see how this thread goes.
More and more, I believe there was an accident or breach of safety protocols at the lab. I think it got out into the population, took a bit for anyone to notice, and by then it was too late.
I don't believe in conspiracies. I believe in evidence. More and more evidence is piling up that something happened. American intelligence was suspicious something happened when all cell phone activity in the lab disappeared in (IIRC) late October - meaning the lab had been evacuated.
Zhengli herself noted that she was working on gain-of-function areas with coronaviruses. A guy testifying to Congress a few weeks ago (I forget who) denied this, even though Zhengli herself has admitted to it.
There are things in the Fauci e-mails where, if you're not at least raising an eyebrow about what was going on in that lab, you're actively not wanting to investigate the situation. Very early on, a major funder of the lab was actively planting and paying for stories in the media to claim a lab leak was conspiracy theory, and promoted the idea that it was a random species jump.
This was a crazy potent virus, it spread fast, and it originated in an area near a lab that just so happens to be tinkering with gain-of-function on coronavirus?
We owe it to our dead to learn what happened here. And if it was the lab, we have to do our damnedest to ensure it never happens again.
We do not definitively know it was the lab. Not yet. But the evidence is beginning to pile. To dismiss the idea completely out hand is dangerous.