Slack / Private Message Drop — page 1066

[2022-01-20 10:25:49] [Robert Garry] Dear Professor Garry, I hope you are well. I am a reporter with The Sunday Times newspaper and I am writing an article for this weekend's paper about the scientific community's investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. In this article I suggest that the scientific consensus reached around the possibility of a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, driven in large part by the seminal Proximal Origin paper, may have been unduly influenced by the political ramifications of the hypothesis. Sorry to say this, but your suggestion is misinformed and completely inaccurate. I mention that the authors have maintained that the process behind the paper was strictly scientific. It was - I concur. I also mention that on a February 1 teleconference you felt a natural scenario to be implausible. Again apologies, but that's completely ridiculous. We were looking at the various SARS-CoV-2 origins scenarios - natural and lab-based - agnostically. I was simply putting the best argument forward in the moment that the FCS might have been engineered - it wasn't. Amongst all the other arguments/emails/discussion on this topic I was having it's cherry-picking and completely out-of-context. There were dozens of other contemporaneous emails/conversations where I was arguing the opposite. It's how science is done. If you would like to respond, please could you do so by my deadline at midday tomorrow? I cannot guarantee that any response will be printed in the piece. Very best, Madeleine [2022-01-20 10:27:54] [Robert Garry] This Sunday Times will be bad - I think Wade's will be much worse. [2022-01-20 10:30:29] [Kristian Andersen] Yup, I think it'll be complete junk - with more junk to come. "completely inaccurate" - I'd say "false" - as it's not really "inaccurate" it's just totally false. [2022-01-20 10:31:49] [Kristian Andersen] "I also mention that on a February 1 teleconference you felt a natural scenario to be implausible" This is also false - you did not mention that you felt that a natural scenario was implausible on the call. The quote she's referring to was from a very early email, taken out of context, and did not reflect your opinions on the "origin" question - it's another example of science in progress. [2022-01-20 10:33:22] [Kristian Andersen] On that last point, I'd probably stick to a version of Andrew's language - "We provided some initial assessments of the plausibility of the various hypotheses and then undertook a more detailed analysis and review of data (including new data from the Pangolins). All of our conclusions were written in our published and peer-reviewed papers (i.e., in Nature Medicine and then updated in Cell late last year). All of the emails show the establishment of the hypotheses we later outlined in the Proximal Origins paper and then the assessment of these based on the available evidence. Opinions simply shifted as the result of analysis and the examination of new data. Since then more data has been published that further supports our conclusions from that initial review." [2022-01-20 10:41:52] [Robert Garry]