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I don't have any particularly useful commentary to give. I only had half an hour to spare and I spent it trying to get through some of the source material, but one of the citations literally leads to a 3,000 page dump of Fauci's emails and many others lead to cascading substack articles.
Do you know the source of these quotes, and where I can read them in context? Reading this slack post comes across as much less damning than the substack article would have you believe. Moreover, the slack post captioned there was written a month after the Nature Medicine paper, no?
I'm skeptical they had severe financial or tenure-related conflicts of interest. Kristian Andersen's lab doesn't seem to engage in any kind of research that would remotely be affected by stricter regulations of GoF bans. The piles of money in Nwallins' video are bitterly funny after spending a solid chunk of my life earning a graduate stipend with 5-6 roommates. Perhaps if they had pushed the lab leak hypothesis at that point they may have suffered negative consequences, although it's worth noting that Alina Chan, Ruslan Medzhitov and numerous other scientists who pushed it later are doing fine. Overall, I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to why they'd be compromised beyond TDS or groupthink.
Regardless, none of the above is written to try and worm out of the fact that the scientific community has earned some lumps on the topic.
Yeah, unfortunately all of the 'cites' are just the single giant unsearchable e-mail archive, or Slack archive, and the quality is marginal enough that OCR and scanning for individual quotes kinda sucks.
I'll see if I can get find a better breakdown later today or tomorrow for the relevant quotes, their context, and their timing, but it is fair to say that the ones more open to serial passage or lab-tied zoonosis are usually earlier in the discussions. If all Andersen et all had done was to emphasis that as the less likely cause by March, I think this would have been more reasonable. But that's really not how he was behaving publicly.
The Slack post from Andersen laying out those three possibilities that's gotten the most attention was from April 17th; this (cw: giant image, bad formatting) is most of the relevant surrounding context, though it might be easier to just download the full PDF and look starting around 3/4ths of the way down. I think Andersen is being far too clever by half when he defends his surrounding behavior; the Slack messages were responding to the cable allegations, but there were a lot of other reasons he cited contemporaneously for even considering a serial passage option (Shi's sequencing, past bad biosafety practices, the furin cleavage site stuff), and there were other matters that were known at the time, many of which dated back to late February, none of which he seems to consider context.
Andersen et all were also pretty aggressively slamming against any form of lab connection publicly throughout this time period; it's not like the paper was a one-and-done, or even the first thing, nor the last thing.
I think the problem from Andersen et all is... well, the reason I linked this in the secondary post. The centralization from NIH grants, along with the general limitations of academia, has kinda made the entire field a little incestuous; even to the extent Andersen's work itself isn't tied to strict-definition gain-of-function research, he's constantly interacting with and eventually going to have his grants okayed and papers reviewed by people who do or did or plan to in the future.
((Beyond that, I think Andersen's highly negative response to Tom Cotton is, as much as the simple Red Tribe Blue Tribe, downstream of Cotton's "America First" perspective, which would matter more to his lab. But that's still an honest disagreement of perspectives; Andersen didn't go into international epidemiology research for the dollars.))
That's true, though it's a very wide definition of 'fine', here. Still, compared to situations where people were actively canceled or defellowed, it does allow for more serious discussion.
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Folk who consider themselves my betters want to insulate me from a truth* that they don't think I can handle, and so deceive me 'for my own good.' Many such cases. The authors of that paper must have felt so vindicated when the first Sinophobic hate crimes started occurring. How much worse might that have been, they must have thought, had we not strangled the lab leak hypothesis in the crib.
Many of my normie friends refused to even discuss COVID origins. The lab-leak hypothesis was a thought crime to them; the sort of thing that conspiritards and racist loons spouted, little different to "Jews did 9/11". That's the environment deliberately created by Andersen et al and the rest of team science. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they also knew how to arse cover if and when the charade fell over. The strenuous denials that they 'ackchually never said that the lab leak hypothesis was off the table' are backed up by a lifetime of practice hedging in the small print.
*The truth being, not that COVID was a lab leak, but that there was a good chance that COVID was a lab leak. Far too subtle a point to expect the plebs to understand.
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