Epoch Times?! Please.
The idea that it’s a bioweapon is crazy, and I believe the reason it has gained currency is that the Chinese are paying people to raise it whenever someone mentions the — very plausible — possibility that it’s a natural virus that got out of the lab. By immediately jumping from #2 to #1, the two are conflated in people’s minds, and are thus both rejected as paranoid nonsense. Many mainstream reporters have been doing this, ridiculing any suggestion that it came from a lab by pretending that the person must think it’s a bioweapon, and only crazy people would think that. This helps China, so the most likely reason why someone would do it is because they’re getting paid.