> > The official story was that we were trying to make COVID die out before it mutated again, but to do that would have required vaccinating all animals as well

> > The official story was that we were trying to make COVID die out before it mutated again, but to do that would have required vaccinating all animals as well. > As far as I'm aware, every circulating covid variant that we've traced has likely come from mutations inside humans, not zoonotic intermixing. IIRC the original Omicron has a strange lineage that looks like a second spillover event, from some animal that had been infected with one of the first variants instead of any that were going around at the time.