"Considered harmful" is what Wikipedia refers to as "weasel words". By whom? Why do we care what they think? It's much better to make the case directly than to attempt to weasel in a (false) sense of consensus. Doing the latter damages your credibility, and you're going to need that.

If you're concerned about conspiracy theories "failing to be debunked", what you need are honest and credible experts. The public can't evaluate the claims themselves. Heck, I'm a pretty smart guy and I can't evaluate the evidence based on looking at the genome itself or even from evaluating the object level claims of people who have. But I and many many others are smart enough to notice a big coincidence when we see one, and smart enough to know that many many people like to think it's a good idea to censor, distort, or otherwise lie about things to paint their preferred viewpoint. Honestly and openness is critical if you want to persuade anyone of anything. If you say "The bio-weapon theory has been debunked as just a conspiracy theory", what am I supposed to take from that? That you are very open to this theory would speak publicly about all evidence you find in its favor if only it existed? Or that you want to silence "information hazards" with weasel phrases and like to use terms like "debunked" or maybe even "conspiracy theory" to discredit ideas without even diving into whether or not they might be true? When the latter is a strong possibility, we can't just take things like "X has been debunked" on faith.

I actually don't think it's a bio-weapon and I do believe it has been debunked. But the reason for this is that when I look to people who are able to evaluate the object level claims themselves, the ones who are capable of honestly considering and stating "yep, this sure looks like a bio-weapon" are actually saying "yeah, I considered that hypothesis myself because it's a totally reasonable thing to check, but it turns out that this one looks natural (and here's why, if you want to check my work)". That is the only way you can debunk these things, since everyone can't become virology experts overnight and you can't declare yourself into credibility by fiat.

You're right that now is not the time to be starting wars, and I think there is a very persuasive case to be made for that. Fighting and posturing are last and second to last resorts respectively, and not ones we want to hastily resort to ever, let alone in difficult times where there might be a flinch to do so. It is a bad idea to pick fights and start wars, especially when the ability to cooperate globally is most important, especially especially without thinking these things through very very carefully. However, this all holds true even if it were a bio-weapon, or escaped from a lab due to negligence, or spread worldwide due to attempted cover-ups/etc. Instead of removing your voice from the conversation that will happen anyway and has to happen anyway, use your voice to say what needs to be said. "Yes, it's very reasonable to suspect that it might be a bio-weapon, and that's why we checked. It doesn't look like it is". "Yes, it is very important for people and organizations to be held accountable for their actions. It is also very important to first make sure we know what those actions actually are and to give people the benefit of the doubt both on what they did and their willingness to take responsibility voluntarily first. Now is the time to cooperate with one another to fight this pandemic. Later is the time to sort through the mistakes we made and make sure we're all working honestly to avoid repeating them for personal gain or otherwise".

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Your evidence shows support that generally it's bad to discuss this conspiracy theory. But it doesn't show evidence that it's helpful to ban it on LessWrong, or in other similar spaces.

The US was lead at the time by leaders who wanted to go to war in Irak. On the other hand, none of the leaders want to move troops towards China or go to war with China.

The conflict that US leaders want to have is one about trade. Then there's a bunch of cyberwar where everybody hacks each other. Powerstruggle will continue to exist regardles of any blame around the virus.

I think the most likely way a physical war could happen if China thinks that it gained power in this exchange because the West is dependend on Chinese produced medical equipment and China decides to take China.

When we had pools that asked for existiential risks engineered bioweapons continue to be very high. Modeling this as a possible bioweapon means that you can get more resources to actually do decent work on that front.