Covid 19 - was it manufactured in Wuhan Lab?

Nicholas Wade is a British author and journalist. He served as the staff writer for the Science Times section of The New York Times from 1982 to 2012. He is the author of the controversial book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human

If Wade is right, this means that President Donald Trump (once again) was also right.
Trump floated this theory, but anti and never-Trumpers went all-in to debunk the theory.
But now more and more prominent scientific thought leaders are trying to get to the truth of what happened and how this started.

Nicholas Wade is not an alarmist, and not a conspiracy theorist. He is one of the most eminent science journalists in the country, having done stints at Science and the New York Times, and he has released a very long, technical, and (if you’re into that sort of thing) riveting article on Medium weighing the evidence on the origin of COVID-19. Did it emerge naturally from an animal species to infect people in Wuhan, possibly at a wet market? Or did it leak out from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
Where I think it is most convincing is in describing the lack of plausibility of natural emergence:
No one has found the bat population that was the source of SARS2, if indeed it ever infected bats. No intermediate host has presented itself, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities that included the testing of 80,000 animals. There is no evidence of the virus making multiple independent jumps from its intermediate host to people, as both the SARS1 and MERS viruses did. There is no evidence from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength in the population as the virus evolved. There is no explanation of why a natural epidemic should break out in Wuhan and nowhere else. There is no good explanation of how the virus acquired its furin cleavage site, which no other SARS-related beta-coronavirus possesses, nor why the site is composed of human-preferred codons. The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities.
Wade weighed up what kind of evidence we do have about the virus itself, the lab, the safety protocols, and the grants funded by the NIH and NIAD, under Doctors Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci. They, and common sense, all point in one direction:
Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”, creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro” and humanized mice (“in vivo”. And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.
The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.
It cannot yet be stated that Dr. Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so.
In other words, this is no longer really just a lab-leak theory; the evidence points to a lab-created theory, too. Now, before you go off, the evidence still also points to something like accident. But a reckless one and an eminently foreseeable one. One that virologists, and their sponsors, such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, were warned about.
Wade also weighs in on the credulity of other science journalists, and the larger media — their inherent bias against theories floated by Donald Trump himself.