[jonnycomputer]

It is a conspiracy theory until you have good data and rigorous analysis. If you cannot see that people resisting jumping on an emotionally appealing bandwagon with racist undertones before careful evidence is collected on it, then I honestly don't know what to do for you.

[salawat]

>If you cannot see that people resisting jumping on an emotionally appealing bandwagon with racist undertones

It wasn't that back then, especially if you were following trends in that vein of research. We just had a cheeto in office, so people reached for the first shoe to dismiss it/discredit the cheeto instead of actually grappling with an intrinsically frightening, destabilizing possibility.

Also, treating anything as a conspiracy theory (a phrase coined, popularized, and cultivated during the Cold War/Vietnam era to discredit activists/leakers) by default is perhaps not the best starting point of a proper investigator. You should be going in with as few notions as can be supported by facts you can prove, or that can't be otherwise immediately disproven. The disprovable ones should only be thrown out if you are handed evidence that disproves it. Something you can't prove, bit you can't get cooperation to disprove is still on the table.

Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must within it contain the truth. And you won't ever get there if you're putting out your eyes in the beginning.

[origin_path]

It is still a conspiracy theory, because it theorizes the existence of a conspiracy designed to cover up the true origins of SARS-CoV-2, it just happens to be a theory that is almost certainly true. The conflation of the term "conspiracy theory" with an entirely separate meaning of "untrue claim" is a huge problem, exactly because it is used as an excuse to censor people who are pointing out where conspiracies are likely to be hiding - a highly valuable and useful activity that society should encourage!

At any rate, this particular conspiracy theory was obviously very likely to be true right from the moment it was first proposed. The analysis and data was always rigorous. This new genetic evidence is good, but the extraordinarily tiny probability of a very unusual new virus emerging right next to one of the only labs in the world doing research on that exact type of thing, already rendered it irrational to adopt the natural origin theory right from day one. You don't even need to study the RNA at all to know that SARS-CoV-2 is a very unusual event, having CoV virus labs in a city is also very unusual, that lab leaks are common, that public databases being pulled offline due to "hacking" right before such a virus emerges is very unusual, and that these things intersecting followed by suspiciously immediate and vehement denial on the back of no evidence at all is also very unusual. Estimate those probabilities and then multiply them together. The number you get is astronomically low.