Covid lab leak evidence is compelling for good reason

An earlier video

Matt Ridley knows more about this subject than anyone else in the media. That is, more than any non-specialist. He's written a book about it (which I've read) and now lays out the evidence for the general reader in a long article in The Times. It's all circumstantial, sure. We know that. But which circumstances are more likely?

Is it more likely that the virus leaked from a laboratory that we know was working with variants of this very virus? With characteristics of the novel coronavirus that had only been found in laboratories not in mature? 

Or is it more likely that it emerged spontaneously in a wet market, where, after three years, we have found no evidence of Covid, after testing over 100,000 animals? And given that the Chinese have a very high motivation to find such animal?

I think it's important to recall that very early in in the pandemic, in January 2020, the expert virologists were themselves saying — in online calls amd emails that have since been made public, if only highly redacted —  that the novel coronavirus SARS CoV-2 looked more as if it had been engineered in a lab, than that it was zoonotic. That's what the experts said in first seeing the genome of the coronavirus. The way they changed their minds, so quickly after a call from Fauci, is very fishy to say the least.

Read to the very last paragraph where Ridley summarises the evidence for each theory. All of it is circumstantial, sure. But which circumstances carry the most weight?

A: lab leak.