These folks think Omicron is consistent with natural evolution in a mouse. I thought their paper was pretty interesting:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.14.472632v1.full.pdf
An epidemiologist once told me it is common knowledge among epidemiologists that immunity to a given variant of the common cold is not very long, perhaps a year. I have not been able to easily find a link demonstrating this though. If this is true it would ruin the moral calculation.
Not to me. Though I don't have domain knowledge here. All I really have to say is that these people that do have domain knowledge see a path for natural evolution. I don't mean to say that this demonstrates the evolution was natural, just that human intervention was not required.