The basic facts are admittedly ripe for conspiracy theory: China’s only high-security infectious-disease laboratory is located in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged. And the lab is famous for its sometimes controversial research on just such pathogens.

Most of the online speculation, evoking chilling scenarios of biological weapons and the like, lacks credible evidence. Some has been directly refuted by science.

But a new report suggesting U.S. diplomats voiced serious concern about safety at the lab in 2018 has added circumstantial backing to a plausible, if unproven, theory — that the virus had natural origins but leaked accidentally from that Wuhan Institute of Virology lab.

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