URGENT -- Omicron "variant" likely to be man-made

It evolved from a strain that is not in circulation as of 1.5 years ago

Two articles caught my attention:

• Omicron prompts new virus origin worries — Washington Times

• The mystery of where omicron came from — and why it matters — NPR

Here are some quotes from the articles:

However, the omicron variant appears to have derived directly from the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, one that has not been observed in the wild in months. — Washington Times

In other words, while scientists can tell that this variant evolved from a strain that was circulating in mid-2020, in the intervening months there's been no trace of all the intermediate versions that scientists would have expected to find as it morphed into its current form. — NPR

The NPR article is the most verbose one. It puts together three hypotheses, all of which are, in my opinion, unlikely, as I explain below.

• Animal source — while Covid does exist in animals, it likely undergoes mutations that favor infecting animals of that particular species (like deer or minks), not infecting people. Omicron seems to be very good at infecting people, as a near-vertical graph of South Africa cases shows:

  

• "Cryptic spread" in an unmonitored region — really? Is there a unmonitored region that is so remote that nobody comes out of it? Any virus that would infect such an “unmonitored region” would quickly infect everyone and run out of persons to transmit and the virus would die off. That is, clearly, not what happened.

• Hypothesis #3: Incubation in an immunocompromised person. This is also extremely unlikely. If the virus is able to live in such a person, there is no evolutionary pressure to develop 50 mutations to be able to rapidly infect other persons.

That this Omicron is a descendant of the original Covid as of 1.5 years ago, which is long dead, and no similar variants were found, leaves the only likely hypothesis to be a human, lab origin.

“Blaming” Africa and “low vaccination rates” would seem to be an easy distraction from an obvious question of whether this is a man-made virus.

The motives for creating and releasing this heavily mutated strain are something that we need to discuss between us to understand. Why would someone do it? What do you think?

I am always the first to suspect malfeasance, but there could be a benign explanation: if Omicron is so fast spreading and if it is as mild as some are saying, Omicron could be a tool to rapidly end the Covid pandemic by infecting everyone with a super mild variant within two months. Please note that this thought is entirely hypothetical and speculative, and in fact there is little actual evidence that Omicron is milder than Delta. There could be other, less charitable explanations in play also. Do chip in with your thoughts, please.

I plan on updating this article if anything new comes along of if my smart contributors suggest any good ideas. So re-check it in a day or two .

If you have a suggestion, please mention it in comments.

See if you can post it someplace where a biologist or a virologist could see it. Let’s get to the bottom of it!

Thanks

Update:

• In this video, Dr Malone also talks about the general possibility of this virus being manufactured.

• This Twitter thread also raises similar issues

  Yuri Deigin @ydeigin

  So what would the conditions need to be for a strain to get that many novel mutations in ~12 months? An immunocompromised person doesn't really fit. An animal reservoir? How big would it need to be?

• Another Twitter post explaining it. It is a great post with details, that are very interesting and arrive to the same conclusions. He calls it a lab “leak” but it is clearly not an unintentional “leak”.

  valentin bruttel @VBruttel

  @ydeigin So to sum this up: 1) SARS2 Omicron genome looks like it was "separated/frozen" between June 2020 and late summer 2021 - This has never before been seen in nature, only in lab leaked pandemics

  

  en.wikipedia.org1977 Russian flu - Wikipedia

Added Dec 5 2021: Bill Gates

Turns out that Bill Gates was sponsoring research at Durban, South Africa. Researchers sponsored by Bill Gates studied exactly the situations that could have led to Omicron (Sars-Cov2 variant evolution in HIV patients). Read my latest article for details.