Was Covid-19 a lab leak?

Politico looks at the case for Covid-19 having leaked from a lab in Wuhan:

The hypothesis that Covid-19 was leaked from a Wuhan lab has leaped from its original host — Trump administration officials and people dismissed as conspiracy theorists — into the body of mainstream debate. Last week, 18 leading scientists published a letter in the academic journal Science calling for further investigation to determine the origin of the pandemic that has killed 3.4 million people worldwide. “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” the scientists wrote.

A few months ago people were being suspended from social media for stating it may have been a lab release, and now it is seen as quite possible.

The case for a lab leak is:

• no sign of an intermediate animal host that could have passed the virus to humans
• no evidence that live mammals were sold at the Wuhan seafood market in 2019
• none of hundreds of animal samples collected from that market had any trace of the virus
• the original 2003 SARS virus leaked up to six times from labs across three countries
• animal infection experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are performed at relatively low biosafety levels
• the virus, whose lineage is found only in southern China, made its way into humans in Wuhan, more than a thousand miles away
• Wuhan does not have horseshoe-bat colonies and is scores of kms from the flight range of them
• The outbreak was at a time of year when the bats hibernate
• The Wuhan lab searched for horseshoe-bat viruses in colonies in rural Yunnan and brought those viruses to Wuhan where they mass-produced, manipulated, and studied them.

None of the above is proof, but it is a fairly strong case for suspicion against the official story.