In some ways this reminds me of the ill-fated flight MH370. It's not that there's compelling evidence that the pilot took deliberate action to divert the plane

In some ways this reminds me of the ill-fated flight MH370. It's not that there's compelling evidence that the pilot took deliberate action to divert the plane and assumedly land it in the Indian Ocean in a place where it would be hard to find because of the distance from land and depth of the ocean. It's that it's the only theory that fits the facts. Likewise, it's not that there's compelling evidence of a lab leak (now or in 2019/2020). It's that we're sort of left with it by process of elimination. For example: if Covid-19 came from an animal population (eg via Wuhan wet markets) then why hasn't that population been found? The sources of SARS and MERS were, I believe, found relatively quickly. Just like we shouldn't just accept the prevailing theory of MH370's disappearance as fact and we should continue to look for the plane and hopefully factually establish what actually happened, we shouldn't take the "lab leak" hypothesis as fact. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As for the articles claims about Omicron origins... I really don't know. I'm certainly no virologist so can't speak to the mutations. That's an odd-looking graph though. I'm also wary of drawing conclusions from anything to do with statistics, just because it's so easy to make a mistake. My favourite example is the long-running idiocy about "natural immunity" being better than a vaccine. This is based on comparing two populations: vaccinated and unvaccinated. Except... those populations aren't equivalent. The vaccinated group includes people who would've died without the vaccine (and thus are more likely to have comorbidities). Those people are dead in the unvaccinated population.