State Dept cables warned: safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses

> As many have pointed out, there is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals. But that is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley.

This is a point many people seem to miss when discussing the origin of the current pandemic. It's not a "conspiracy theory" to suggest the virus escaped from a lab, and given the details in this article it seems pretty likely.