That's an opinion piece by a journalist with a BA in Natural Sciences from 1964, not a virologist or otherwise an expert on any of the topics. His claims have not held up well and the biggest scientist he interviewed (David Baltimore) has backed away from that[1]. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and he had very little other than speculation.
I mention all of that because even that wobbly claim was still couched in terms like “did” or “could” while the comment I replied to described it as “likely prevailing truth”. We have no evidence and limited data supporting that hypothesis and a number of people pushing it for political reasons, which is rarely helpful to the scientific process.
until it stops being true that the lead scientist at the wiv pioneered work in & published papers about inserting FCSes -- which other than covid do not exist in coronaviruses -- into bat coronaviruses for gain of function research, you will be facing a very uphill battle. there are so many damning claims in that piece that would be convincing on their own that i suspect you haven't even read it.
If you read it more carefully, notice how those claims are much stronger than the supporting evidence. Note how often he says something is possible and then treats it as the most probable explanation without doing the real work of establishing it as such - this is one of the things all of the actual scientists who critiqued this op-ed focused on.
