Given the number of bats in the world, the number of human hosts, and probably most importantly, the number of individual virions within each infected host (and therefore the number of replication cycles) is...astronomically high. There are somewhere between 1 and 100 BILLION virions of COVID in each infected person. Now imagine a few thousand bats infected...we are already talking about maybe 1 QUADRILLION different virions (1,000 trillion). It only takes one virion to incorporate some very handy and fitness-increasing HIV-1 RNA into its genome and it is off to the races.

I truly have no idea what the answer is, but as someone well versed in economics, econometrics,and statistics, to me the relevant odds are not about independent coin tosses etc. I would like to know P(A|B) where:

A: sequence of 30 nucleotides appears in a virus identified in nature

B: sequence appears in a patent application that predates discovery in nature

Seems to me that would involve a whole bunch of arithmetic, but that ought to be calculable using this database.

Hell, the entire genetic code of every variant of COVID-19 exists somewhere in the digits of Pi, but that doesn't mean that mathematicians created COVID. This reeks of a slightly more advanced form of numerology to me.

The reality is that average people simply aren't qualified to deal with the subtlety and complexity of ambiguous data, and the adversaries of public health can just make a video that lies and convince millions of people with seductive, but wrong, ideas. It's extremely rare to have a society which is scientifically savvy enough to understand these sorts of things.

(Preemptive) Synonymous mutations are able to be selected, as they affect speed of translation and protein folding due to stalled ribosomes.

Why, according to you are they worth and not worth examining?

So yeah. Credentials do matter, and it matters that this person is not willing to say this out loud, in public, without using a pseudonym.

Reputable journals and other publication outlets use something called "Double Blind peer review" precisely to prevent that the reputation of a researcher could skew the peer review process.

If you want to review and cast a judgement for the points presented in the article, you should do it only by refuting or confirming the content of the text itself. Not because it was written by Einstein or Donald Trump.

Double blind peer review is INCREDIBLY UNCOMMON among high impact biomedical journals

Anyway the blinding, when it exists, is as much to protect the reviewers from retribution by asshole authors, as it is to avoid biasing the reviewers by the reputation of the authors.

Second, you're missing the key difference, here: peer review is for review and evaluation within the community of qualified scientists.

What I'm talking about is something else: the ability of the reasonably well-informed public to evaluate claims, even though they lack domain expertise.

(Musing: What is the probability that a genetics expert's opinion on the probabilities at play would make the discussion less well-informed rather than more well-informed?)

The problem is that we've come so far that him not saying this out loud is not necessarily hinting to him being a charlatan. Plausibly, the cost/benefit analysis by that individum might not make it worth speaking the truth given how heated up the matter is rn. If this sentiment propagates to other topics I fear that larger (and important) parts of the world might drift towards soviet era incompetence