Only the conspiracy theorists claim it was an "engineered bio-weapon". The most likely explanation is that it just escaped involuntarily from the lab. Why from the lab, and not the wet market?
- that lab was specifically researching coronavirii in bats
- there are reports researchers there got splashed with blood and fecies of bats [0]
- the researcher in question (Huang Yan Lin), the likely patient zero, disappeared without a trace, both physically and online [0]
- the horseshoe bats that most likely hosted the virus weren't even sold on the wuhan wet market, according to several eye witnesses
- there are no known horseshoe bat colonies in a 900km diameter around wuhan
- the lab is just 280 meters away from the wet market, so the market was a very convenient scape goat
And why was COVID-19 not engineered? Simple, it is not necessary to explain the pandemic potential. All of this is not new and there were warnings about exactly this happening:
- it was long known that horseshoe bats were a dangerous reservoir of SARS-CoV like virii [1]
- there were US simulations held on how to respond to a respiratory virus with chinese origin in 2019 [2]
- there were WHO warnings on how respiratory RNA virii are prime candidates for the next pandemic [3]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU (starts at ~3:00) [1] https://twitter.com/_benoux_/status/1245381552672059392?s=20 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson_Contagion [3] https://twitter.com/bmiloy/status/1238541860542377984/photo/...