[jacquesm]

That's a good question and there is a lot of speculation about that but ultimately we just do not know. There is a whole tree that you can set up to track their reasons, the big branch at the beginning is labeled 'it doesn't work' (which obviously is a bit short on the confirming side, it may still have a 'fraud' and a 'true believers' branch but that's academic) and then from the other branch you get branches which may be labeled as 'they don't know how they did it' and so on.

[EthanHeilman]

They weren't ready to publish and then got forced into the lime light by a member of their team going rogue. We should give them some benefit of the doubt due to the circumstances, even if LK-99 turns out not to be a SC, they didn't choose to publish.

[jacquesm]

Oh I definitely do give them the benefit of the doubt. Regardless of what is going on as long as it eventually works as advertised it's all fine and as long as their samples don't go missing they have a way out that's pretty easy.