| > It doesn’t mention for example, that those scientists who immediately changed their views concurrently received millions of dollars in new grants Would you have preferred that they have their grant applications cancelled after having published a paper? Let's dig in a little bit to the weasel words here. ======== > Fauci "prompted" authors of the influential Proximal Origin paper Here's the source email that mentions this nefarious "prompting": > There has been a lot of speculation, fear mongering, and
conspiracies put forward in this space and we thought that bringing
some clarity to this discussion might be of interest to Nature [sic]. Prompted by Jeremy Farrah [sic], Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins, Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, Ian Lipkin, and myself have been working through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus. What a smoking gun! Err... I guess not... ===== > worked with NIH leadership to “put down” the lab-leak hypothesis This refers to Francis Collins asking Fauci whether there was more that could kill momentum behind the competing theory. It's important to note this momentum was driven primarily by media attention and not growing scientific consensus or any new scientific evidence. That is entirely consistent with someone who does not want what they see as an incorrect explanation to become the public's consensus view (especially when concerned about the possible ramifications of that consensus forming without sufficient evidence). This happened after Fauci had "prompted [a team] to work through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus." Fauci's response: "I would not do anything about this right now." ==== Again: No one prevented any scientist from publishing their competing theories. They may have had a hard time getting taken seriously, they may have not been accepted to Nature, they may have been called a quack: but that is often what it means to go up against the consensus view. That is not censorship. That is the imperfect system of science as it always works in every domain. |
I don't understand what you're saying here. We know that Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry were concerned that the virus was not of natural origin because Andersen wrote to Fauci and Collins on January 31 that “some of the features [of SARS-CoV-2] … look engineered” and that he, Robert Garry and others found the genome “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
The next day they joined Fauci's emergency teleconference and 11 days later they submitted The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 to Nature. Five weeks after the paper appeared in Nature, Fauci's institute (NIAID) awarded Andersen and Garry a new $8.9 million grant, naming them co-principal investigators of the West African Emerging Infectious Disease Research Center.
One might argue that each link in this chain of events is in principle explainable in perfectly innocent terms, and that's true. But to do so would be ironically concordant with the sort of reasoning and argumentation exhibited in the Proximal Origins paper. Specifically, at each turn the original concerns of Andersen and Garry are addressed in a manner emphasizing that in principle the anomaly could be explained in innocent terms. So for example, the poly-basic (RRAR) cleavage site could arise by ordinary insertion or recombination because similar sites appear in other coronaviruses and even evolve during serial passage of influenza, so its presence is “compatible with natural evolution,” and the codon context and flanking O-linked glycans would be an odd choice for a genetic engineer but fit with immuno-evasion seen in naturally evolving viruses, and the genome is “not derived from any previously used virus backbone”, and so on.
What they don't do is adduce any evidence that these theoretical natural pathways actually obtained, they don't systematically weigh their joint probability, and they don't seriously address the possibility of inadvertent lab adaptation and escape (they label the scenario as "improbable" in a single paragraph).
All of which is to say that it seems implausible that they themselves were actually convinced by their arguments. And if they weren't convinced by their arguments, then it seems likely they didn't actually change their view, just publicly voiced the opposite view. Why would they do that? I can think of 8.9 million reasons.