Could the COVID-19 pandemic have started with a lab-leak?

The largest newspaper in Norway, VG, recently ran the following top story in its online edition:

Using the headline “- May become the largest scandal of all time”, with the subtitle "Was the world deceived about covid-19?" they have created a story where Sigrid Bratlie, who has a PhD in molecular biology, is the primary source.

Bratlie is also a senior advisor at the think tank Langsikt, which earlier this summer published a paper arguing that the lab-leak hypothesis is the most plausible explanation for the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 pandemic.

What evidence do we have?

But before we take a closer look at this note, which reviews Bratlie's key arguments for why she now feels 80-90% confident that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease and the pandemic that really kicked off early in 2020, was laboratory-created, it's important to point out the following:

Since 2020, when it was first discussed whether the virus had a natural origin (zoonotic, i.e. transmitt…