As a GoF researcher you don't want to cull 'silent' mutations because those are a major source of building blocks for useful mutations.
In a virus, most nucleic acids have multiple, layered, and unknown functions - it's much much harder to assign any given nucleic acid as "silent", and be confident that that is the case from an evolutionary perspective.
As another posted, it's a good hypothesis that's straightforward to test statistically against all of the other variants. But on its own, it's not necessarily convincing here that the S/NS ratio is particularly concerning (and as above, doesn't speak to how directed evolution works either).
I mean, we can find anyone on Twitter saying anything. I could create an account right now that says I'm an expert on time travel and tweet about it.
And of course now that omicron is circulating widely in humans, its pattern and ratio of mutations is occurring as one would expect. I wonder why something we know is a natural occurrence (mutation as it infects humans worldwide) looks natural. It makes me wonder why the original omicron looked so weird.
To me this is not a conversation about whether a lab leak occurred. It's a conversation about why the experts are not ruling out hypotheses that explain the information so they can (if necessary) move on to other hypotheses. Just dismissing hypotheses that explain the existing information is not very scientific, unless the hypotheses are untestable or are truly off the wall. This hypothesis is not truly off the wall.
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.
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.