Some preliminary comments from me, as a science journalist. First: This is serious business. These authors are claiming to have found fingerprints left in SARS-CoV-2 left by stitching together the parts that allegedly went to making it. If true...

2/ It would be the first direct evidence for lab origins hypothesis (which takes several forms), which up to now does not exist--only some circumstantial indications. There is NO direct evidence for the natural origins hypothesis. The closest we have...

are the Worobey and Pekar papers published in Science in July of this year, which claimed to trace the "epicenter" of the pandemic to the Huanan "seafood" market in Wuhan. Those papers have numerous limitations, outlined by others, which make them far from the last word.

3/ These new authors do not speculate at all about where the genetic engineering--for which they are finding a very high likelihood based on statistics--too place, but of course Wuhan and its Institute of Virology would be a reasonable suspect...

4/ This paper presents a critical challenge for science journalists. They can ignore it, although I think that will quickly become very difficult. They can run to the usual suspects for comment on Covid origins--Worobey, Rasmussen, Ebright, Chan--but that would be lazy...

5/ reporting even though it is what most reporters have done. OR, they can do their very best to explain the findings to their audiences, and find experts we have not heard from before to study the paper closely and comment on it. Eg:

6/ Already, without taking more than two breaths, some scientists with clear vested interests in the origins debate--including some who have tried to trash any suggestion of a lab origin as a "conspiracy theory"--are trying to trash this paper. They don't want to be wrong.

7/ Given all the millions who have died, and the incredible suffering the pandemic has caused, we all deserve better than that--from scientists and from science journalists. If you see the usual suspects weighing in on this, please ignore them. Follow those who...

8/ have not been heard from before and who are weighing in. Also: It took a lot of courage for this team to put this preprint online and even do the study. The weight of attempts to suppress even a debate over Covid origins has been heavy, nasty, and dishonest.

9/ Finally: Be especially wary of the "you should talk to a virologist" and "I'm a virologist and you're not" school of gaslighting and gatekeeping in scientific communication. That is not science, it's propaganda, and we don't need it. Let the truth be found, freely.

10/ I said finally, but: A big question for me is why this analysis was not done before. It seems to me an obvious thing to do. Instead, qualitative rather than quantitative statements were made in the literature about whether there were signs of design in the genome...

11/ From talking to folks, the answer so far seems to be that trying to do this research--as I said above--was risky for scientists who might try it, given the huge effort from certain quarters to suppress the lab leak hypothesis based on politics, not science.

12/ So look closely at the motivations of anyone who does not want to give this paper its day in scientific court, and look for other teams to do their own analyses in the near future.