3 years ago, this would have gotten one smeared as a racist science denier.

It’s becoming undeniable: COVID came from a Chinese lab.

Evidence that COVID came from a Chinese lab mounted toward a conclusive level last week: “Multiple government sources” say the very first people infected by the bug were Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers, a new report reveals.

More, they were allegedly modifying a close relative of the virus with a key feature unique to it.

The report — by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag, posted on the outlet Public — names Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu as WIV scientists who developed COVID symptoms as early as November 2019, a month before the world even heard of the outbreak, and who now appear to be “patients zero.”

A source said officials were “100%” certain these three were the ones who developed the symptoms.

It’s “a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else,” marvels World Health Organization expert Jamie Metzl. “That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher” in the WIV lab.

Add in all the other evidence — especially the scientists’ gain-of-function work using a close relative of the COVID bug — and it’s now impossible to ignore the extreme likelihood that a leak from the lab sparked the global pandemic behind nearly 7 million deaths and untold economic harm.

It also points a damning finger at China for having waged the greatest coverup in history of the world — abetted by Westerners from Dr. Anthony Fauci to Big Tech to countless liberals and left-leaning media voices who misled the public by pooh-poohing the lab-leak theory early on, and actively suppressing those who pointed to evidence backing the theory.

Most tragically, per another report last week citing newly released cables, State Department officials believed the entire pandemic could’ve been contained early on if China had alerted the world of the outbreak instead of censoring news of it.

Oh, and guess who paid for at least some of Wuhan lab research that now appears to have sparked the pandemic? That’s right: you.

A Government Accountability Office breakdown Wednesday shows at least $2 million in US taxpayer funds went to the lab between 2014 and 2021, via the National Institute of Health, the University of California and a group called the EcoHealth Alliance.

Tuesday’s report on Patients Zero, meanwhile, came on the heels of another in the Sunday Times (of London), in which a US investigator says it’s now become “increasingly clear” the WIV “was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

US scientists working with those at the WIV acknowledged their counterparts inserted “furin cleavage sites” into SARS-like viruses in 2019.

And it’s COVID’s unique furin cleavage sites that make it so much more transmissible.

It’s not fully clear exactly when government officials learned of the scientists or other key facts, but as early as April 30, 2020, President Donald Trump said he’d seen evidence that COVID came from a WIV lab, though he provided no details.

Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited “enormous evidence.”And Taibbi reports at Racket that “numerous federal agencies appear to have designed their probes of Covid-19’s origins so as to discount the possibility of lab origin in advance.”

That is, they worked to avoid evidence that they presumably didn’t want to know.

At least one intel agency even “overruled a majority of its in-house investigators” to produce a report discounting the lab-leak hypothesis.

The obvious motive for such suppression: avoiding any chance of stories linking US-funded research at WIV to the eventual deaths of millions — even if it meant covering for Beijing, too.

At some point, Washington is going to have to confront China on its horrific role in releasing the COVID plague and then covering it up.

A whole lot of US officials — and journalists — will also have a whole lot of explaining to do.