What questions, exactly? Just why they changed their minds?
I’ve seen them but don’t remember the details. As I recall, there were features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that they thought looked unusual for a coronavirus but that proved to be less surprising when they learned more about a wider range of coronaviruses. If it helps to understand the exchanges better, Kristian in particular is somebody I describe as often right and always certain. And quite energetic about his beliefs, at least until they change.
Or perhaps after recognizing their careers depend on grants from people who are beholden to China and people who are complicit in the gain of function research in the Wuhan lab, they choose to keep their livelihoods.
Follow the money.
“Look, I try to be civil in these discussions, but this kind of insinuation is offensive and libelous. I know Bob and Kristian, the latter very well. The idea that either would falsify scientific conclusions for any reason is grotesque.”
People are surprised about people they thought they knew very often.
To say what is possible and plausible is not libelous.
Calling someone’s integrity into question is a serious charge and not one to be used lightly. This is especially true for scientists because their entire careers depend on their integrity. The accusations you are making are some of the most serious that can be made, and you seem to be doing so in a flippant and self serving manner.
If the only fall back you have is to question the integrity of many, many scientists you have no knowledge of, then you need to find a different argument.
It is just as naive to assume any confidential information they have is any more compelling than the public information. Until they explain how they reached their conclusions there is going to be a lot of doubt in their conclusions. If they say that they have compelling confidential information then they can share it with members of Congress and they can report back to us.
How old were you in 2002 during the run up to the Iraq War? Turns out, the public information on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq showed quite a compelling case for Iraq not having them. We were told by intelligence agencies that there was very compelling intelligence that Iraq had WMD’s, but we couldn’t see it. Later on, we learned how weak and contrived that intelligence was, and how accurate the public information was.
Basically what happened in that month where Kristian Andersen went from saying this can’t be published, “we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered,” to publishing something which indicated high confidence in a natural origin, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
“In the above exchange, the health officials seem to be contemplating the possibility that the repeated passage of a coronavirus through genetically modified mice in an insufficiently secure lab could have resulted in the accidental emergence and release of SARS-CoV-2.”
I’m pretty sure that, having seen from other coronaviruses that the potentially manmade features of SARS-CoV-2 could in reality easily have evolved naturally, they concluded that zoonotic spillover was more likely than a lab leak. I suspect they then overstated that conclusion as effectively ruling out a lab leak, which it didn’t. Probably in response to some pretty wild claims about the virus that were becoming popular. As I said, usually right and always confident.
I used ‘grotesque’ to describe the idea that a bunch of scientists lied and intentionally covered up the real cause of a major public health disaster. Scientists overstating the certainty of their conclusions (usually because their own confidence is higher than it should be) is just an unfortunate but routine reality about the humans who do science.