As a result, we concluded that the formation of a part of Omicron isolates BA.1, BA.1.1, and BA.2 was not the product of genome evolution, as is commonly observed in nature, such as the accumulation of mutations and homologous recombinations. Furthermore, the study of 35 recombinant isolates of Omicron variants BA.1 and BA.2 confirmed that Omicron variants were already present in 2020. The analysis showed that Omicron variants were formed by an entirely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biology, and knowing how the SARS-CoV-2 variants were formed prompts a reconsideration of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic
Given what we know about the infectivity of Omicron, the combinatjion “Omicron was around in 2020” seems pretty astonishing. Combine this with “Omicron variants were formed by an entirely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biolog” and I’m going to suggest that the most likely explanation is that they cocked up their data somewhere.
I’m not qualified to peer review this - and it looks like no-one else has yet.
Or, and I don’t know which is scarier, the nuts were right and COVID was partially manmade.
If that’s correct - it is what it is and it’s better to know the truth. Evidence isn’t compelling at the moment though.
This is missing the biggest piece: phylogenetic analysis. They aligned a selected group of mutations and then eyeballed the alignments and then speculated.
Here’s what the methods section for this paper should look like in order to make the theoretical leap.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8969601/A reasonable phylogenetic tree is here: https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global/6m
