To me, as a trained virologist who is currently working in virology and spent most of 2020 and 2021 on COVID work, the idea that COVID-19 didn't come from a lab beggars belief. This is independent of political leanings as mine are definitely not those of politicians promoting the lab leak theory.
It's really quite simple statistics -- the chance of a new and highly virulent virus emerging independently *in the same city* that houses a lab studying coronaviruses is almost impossibly low.
I am not accusing the Chinese of engineering the virus or deliberately releasing it. Someone just got sloppy in a lab with a sample from the wild, infected themselves, and brought the infection home with them.
I worked in a lab at University of Chicago that was set up for BSL3 containment, although it was not being used for that purpose at the time I was there. It is *very* easy to see how a lab leak can occur without extreme diligence.
