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Hello and welcome to Spectator out loud.

Each week we choose three pieces from the magazine and ask our writers to read

them aloud. Coming up on the podcast this week, Matt Ridley reveals the identity of the

scientists in the Wuhan Laboratory linked to COVID. Martin Newland makes the moral case for becoming a foster carer, and Mary

Wakefield confesses her hatred of drones. First up, it's Matt Ridley. That a pandemic caused by a

bat coronavirus started in the city with the world's largest program of research into bat coronaviruses,

was always intriguing, that among the first people to get ill with allegedly COVID-like symptoms

in the month the pandemic began, where three scientists working in that lab, was highly suspicious. Now that we know their

names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of SARS-CoV-2

at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus.

These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab leak hypothesis.

On the 10th of June, the author and free speech campaigner Michael Schellenberger broke the news

at his substack site that the three

six scientists were Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yanju, as confirmed to him by multiple US intelligence

sources frustrated by the Biden administration's refusal to release this key fact.

This week I was with him when the Wall Street Journal announced that it had independently confirmed

his story with its intelligence sources.

Who is Doctor Who?

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has hundreds of scientists, but there is one team, the

...