There's a theory that a) the virus was accidentally engineered and leaked from a US laboratory (Fort Detrick) in August 2019, and b) accidentally spread in Wuhan during the World Military Games of October.
The theory has been dismissed in the USA as Chinese propaganda. It has actually been spread by Western conspiracy theorists. See for example Larry Romanoff (in Center for Research on Globalization) or Johan van Dongen or Ronnie Cummins or Peter Koenig or Kevin Barrett. These names don't sound Chinese to me. But the very first person to spread this conspiracy theory was probably a Russian, Igor Nikulin, first mentioned on the Russian Army's media outlet Zvezda on 20 January 2020 and then repeated on dozens of pro-Russian media. Nikulin argued that the USA not only deliberately created covid as a bioweapon but specifially to attack China. I find it bizarre that neofascist media like Fox News blame it on Chinese propaganda when in fact it seems to originate and spread in the West and in Russia.
These individuals were originally enrolled in a prospective lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 to track the date of onset, frequency, and temporal and geographic variations in lung cancer across the Italian regions.
In the first two months of the study, the researchers revealed that 14.2 percent of the patients in September and 16.3 percent in October exhibited SARS-CoV-2 IgG or IgM antibodies, or both. The team found the first positive case (IgM-positive) on September 3 in the Veneto Region, followed by one case in Emilia Romagna on September 4, Liguria on September 5, and one in Lazio on September 11.
——如果中国开放脸书或推特(张维为教授一直这么主张)，那么中国的声音将淹没美国的阴谋论。所谓公道自在人心，人民群众的眼睛是雪亮的。美国拜登要求停止科学家对新冠病毒溯源的调查，转而让情报专家来主持调查。而中国坚持要由科学家来调查，拒绝一切情报专家的参与。原因大家也心知肚明，就是要防止美国再拿出“一小瓶洗衣粉”来。世界人民并不是不知道这一点，只是畏于美国的淫威，不敢说出来。现在由中国大声说出来，世人都在心里为中国鼓掌。如果把中国提案与美国提案，都拿到WHO上去表决，赞成中国提案的——第二阶段溯源调查，去美国德克里克堡生物实验室——绝对是大多数。美国敢搞这样的表决么？