The article is effectively creating a conspiracy theory by leaving out the most important aspects of the motivation of the whole research:

- The virology experts have known for decades that "spillovers" from animals to humans happen.

- The virology experts did their research exactly with the goal to learn more about the viruses that could cause the next pandemics.

- Bats were known as the animals in which a lot of different viruses spread that could be with the high potential danger to humans, and it was also known that their viruses reach humans easier than those from many other animals.

- That is exactly the reason immense number of samples were made in the bat caves.

- The importance of this work was known and it was not a Chinese but an international project.

- It was internationally recognized that the more viruses we can collect, catalogue and research, the more chances we could have to avoid the consequences like this pandemics that we live now.

- The people who do their work exactly to be able to prevent the next pandemic are obviously those who are more aware how carefully they should handle the samples and perform the sampling.

- The number of the samples was huge, so much that not all samples were able to be as much analyzed as it was done later, once the similarity with the ongoing epidemic was searched for: there are different processes possible, and some are much more time consuming.

- The sampling was done in many caves, not only some specific.

- The sampling was done in hamzat suits, exactly because it was known that other approaches would be too dangerous.

- The people doing the sampling were not the only ones having the contact with the viruses from bats. Exactly because it was known that the different viruses from bats in different moments "find the way" to the humans, typically those who live close to the caves, it was known that the researching exactly the samples from bats is especially worth doing.

- The SARS-CoV-2 doesn't look like at all like a virus that the experts produce for their experiments. Any virologist who knows how these experiments are exactly done can confirm that -- so the claim that the virus is human made is not something that is supported by any expert.

- Likewise, because the experts know that the research was necessary and how it is performed, they don't believe that the "spillover" resulted from the infected people working with the lab. They know that such events happen all the time in nature.

In short trying to associate the SARS-CoV-2 with the work of the lab is something done by non-experts only, and only by those who have some agenda to create such stories.

Specifically, I've just checked who Eric Weinstein is: "Eric Ross Weinstein" "is the managing director of Thiel Capital, Peter Thiel's investment firm, a position he has held since 2015." says Wikipedia. Not an expert at all, but almost surely somebody who could have an agenda.

The article in The Times manages to give the outbreak an "aura" of the intentional event by "asking questions" tricks ("Ancient Aliens" style "some believe that were aliens, maybe it is true?") and "cherry picking" the details out of the context. The research was done exactly because it was known that the outbreaks happen even if we don't do anything, so it's much better to try to learn as much as it is possible before.