I spent at least an hour reading through both the emails and the slack messages in this "expose", but I came away from it fairly certain that they are being portrayed unfairly, and I'm fairly surprised that Nate Silver has latched on to this. You have to both look at the time-line of the paper writing and the time-line of the conversations. By my reading, by the time the paper was being written, most of them had indeed come to the conclusion that (1) there was no evidence for an engineered virus, (2) that the data was consistent with both a leak from a lab (without engineering) or from exposure to animals, but that (3) the former was not as a priori likely, given what they knew about the kinds of research being done.
You just can't take something someone says in Jan. 2020 at the start of their looking at the problem, and what they said in their paper written in Feb. 2020 on the same level. They started with concerns that it was an engineered virus and moved away from that view the more they learned.
You just can't take something someone says in Jan. 2020 at the start of their looking at the problem, and what they said in their paper written in Feb. 2020 on the same level. They started with concerns that it was an engineered virus and moved away from that view the more they learned.