I'll go way out on a limb and offer that Dr. Ander

I'll go way out on a limb and offer that Dr. Andersen has actual actual science education, not just google or duckduckgo. Cambridge and Harvard seem to be pretty decent universities.

https://www.scripps.edu/faculty/andersen/

With documented infections in lion, tigers (don't know about bears), mink and deer, zoonotic mutation and transmission back to humans is certainly possible.

Quote:

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Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California, told medical news outlet Stat that Omicron could be zoonotic; that is, it could have circulated in animal hosts before jumping to humans. I don't think we should dismiss that possibility, because I think it's definitely on the table," he told Stat, adding that this theory "seems more likely" to him than the persistent human infection theory.

Other experts have not discounted the suggestion. The notable aspect of Omicron is that it appeared with a significant number of mutations at once, Spyros Lytras, a researcher at the University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, told Newsweek—in a phenomenon known as "long branch."

This could be the result of three possibilities. The first possibility is that the mutations happened one by one in a country that did not detect them through sequencing, which Lytras considers unlikely. The second possibility is that the mutations accumulated in a single patient through chronic infection. The third possibility is that the mutations occurred in an animal host that caught COVID from humans before spreading it back to humans again.

"I find this to be the scariest possibility," he said of the animal route, "but given the amount of wild animal population known to have SARS-CoV-2 transmission it's certainly a scenario that can't be discounted." SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus that causes COVID.

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