It is extremely frightening, and it's important that we continue to fight for freedom of expression on all platforms.

Unfortunately so many have an innate bias against the US that any criticism of it is considered fair game regardless of how conspiratorial or absurd.

> Meanwhile, you can freely conspiracy theorize all you like about the machinations of the CIA, NSA, etc., regardless of how little evidence you have

That's not true at all. Rather, there's randomness around what gets flagged and/or moderated. People read into that whatever patterns they want to see, or are already convinced are happening.

It seems like you want me to jump to a conclusion, but all I see is a researcher that studied a virus that has potential to jump to human hosts, and that has a natural reservoir in the area that the do their research.

No, they didn't just study it. They engineered a variant of a SARS-like coronavirus specifically to be able to infect humans. The paper's abstract says they did this by "combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat."

Yes, that's how one studies these things. The models we have in simulation are far too crude, so scientists are forced to make the real versions. I have a friend who does this with tuberculosis to study how it develops resistance to drugs. Part of it was trying to enhance or block certain genetic pathways, and yes, sometimes it results in tuberculosis strains with much higher adaptivity than normal. This is how we learn what the pathogen uses, and, hopefully, how to stop it, or at least how not to make the situation worse.

Hey man, no argument from me; I appreciate the need to study deadly diseases in the flesh. I just wonder if they could maybe locate their biosafety-level-4 lab somewhere other than in a metropolis of eleven million people. You know, just in case.

For what it's worth, one of the names on that paper is Shi Zhengli, one of the lab’s top researchers who is now defending the lab to the media:

[Shi Zhengli] said on her social media account that she “guaranteed with her own life” that the outbreak had nothing to do with the lab but was a “nemesis for the barbaric habits and lifestyle of some people – like eating wild game including bats.”

https://asiatimes.com/2020/02/coronavirus-lab-leakage-rumors...

EDIT:

As I noted in my other comment, these researchers didn't actually create a new coronavirus, but rather a much simpler and safer virus purpose-built to test some receptor-binding structures.