Viewing this sort of issue as equivalent in personal magnitude and meaning to Galileo’s heliocentrism dispute with the renaissance church is exactly the perspective I seek to avoid by framing my mindset like the earlier commenter, personally.

Isn't the difference evidence? There were people jumping to all kinds of theories without evidence at the beginning, but acting like they knew for sure whatever their theory was. Some happened to be right, but that doesn't mean that the lesson to be learned is truth can best be found by jumping to conclusions without evidence.

If that was the lesson, then we should be jumping to exciting new conclusions without evidence like "actually, it's only changing now because US propaganda wants to harm China for their failure to align against Russia, and pinning COVID on them is a super convenient way to do that." Or whatever other exciting new theories you can come up, unbound from any evidence other than it sounds like something that could be plausible. Who knows maybe I will turn out right and I can rub it in everyone's faces later.

I mean, it was an unfounded conspiracy theory before, wasn't it? When new evidence came about then it shifted into legitimacy. That's just how evidence works.

In this context I think you're pattern matching too deterministically on the term "conspiracy theory". I just read it as "random negative news headlines of the moment". Ironically this kind of poor pattern matching is what led to the situation you speak of, where anyone talking about the lab leak hypothesis got pattern matched as sinophobic / a conspiracy theorist.

This is the stuff that is exhausting.

Why focus on it? What good does it bring to you?

Uhh. The facts are off the map for media companies and the government media.

Society alternates between 3 functions. Hiding away facts, milking good times and taking valuable resources off the map.

We're just the weird people who remember the old-school world, where the public knowing the facts was a point of order and the science would settle it all.

Conspiracies theories appear to sound the alarm on it all, but they have no unique, private facts to share with the public, just like everyone else.

Do you also remember COVID is a hoax, the vaccine is killing people for population control, 5G causes COVID, ivermectin is the real cure etc? The sheer volume is what is exhausting.

Lab leak != lab origination. It could have escaped the lab, but that doesn't mean it was created there.