[Jyaif]

> how else it could have happened other than some GoF procedure

There are at least 2 other possibilities:

* The virus could have stayed alive in an immunocompromised person for months and accumulated mutations there.

* The virus could have jumped to animals (e.g. mouses), accumulate mutations, and jump back to humans.

[dljones]

Neither one of those hypotheses accounts for the four weirdnesses described in the article. So they don't seem like very good hypotheses.

Similarly "it came from an animal" that we've never found two years later is not a hypothesis that accounts for the information we have about the first COVID-19 outbreak either.

To me that sounds very much like OJ vowing to find the real killer, but somehow he never did.