— “If this person thinks Omicron existed widely before being noticed, it would be easy to find examples in the database.”
Please show us how easy by you surveying “the several million...”
Easy. Yup. Easy.
We have these wonderful tools called “search engines” that can today search millions of documents very quickly. It’s really quite wonderful.
If you want to search for a sequence in the Covid-19 database you can do so here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/virus/vssi/#/find-data/sequence