This Canadian left-lib has better political instincts than every radlib who's being "intellectually honest" about the possibility of this.

I don’t trust the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology last year. It’s too good a story to be true.

Part of my skepticism is professional: escaped viruses have been the plot gimmick for far too many terrible books and movies about pandemics and zombies and the post-apocalyptic world. Even if you’ve avoided such plots, you know the general storyline, so the lab leak isn’t a brand-new idea. It’s also like a whodunit, with the villain revealed and the other suspects exonerated.

. . .

As for a weaponized virus, we’ll have to build a big backstory for that plot to hold together: a coronavirus is discovered maybe 20 years ago and found to have dangerous pandemic potential. Someone in the Chinese government, knowing that other governments are doing research in biowarfare, authorizes further studies. These will involve many highly skilled specialists recruited from all over China. They will likely cease publishing their own research.

(That was how the Soviets, early in the Second World War, knew the Americans were building an atomic bomb: a young Russian physicist read some recent U.S. scientific journals and noted the absence of articles by scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi. He went straight to Stalin with the news.)