https://www.documentcloud.org/app?q=%2Bproject%3Asubcommitte...
>> “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need irrefutable evidence. My position is that the natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but __we have no evidence that that happened__.”
>> Not that discussing it isn't fun
(My underlining)
The email and Slack messages' significance has been overblown. The communications make it clear that the authors of the paper had no evidence to support a lab leak theory.
It is obvious this whole thing is played for political gains, much like the email leaks of climate scientists a few years ago where held up by "skeptics" as evidence that the whole climate change thing was made up.
> Likely in hopes of fostering that illusion of inevitability, as well as of transparency, the Public crew made the Slacks and a separate document trove containing scientists’ emails available for download. This is also a well-worn tactic seen, for instance, in the mass release of hacked emails from Democratic staffers during the 2016 presidential campaign: You put out a document dump of hundreds of pages that few will have time to read, cherry-pick the lines that best serve your narrative, then set a legion of fans loose on the internet to scream “READ THE SLACK MESSAGES” at anyone who disagrees.
> Well, I did read the Slack messages. And it seems my skepticism of Silver, Shellenberger, and their cohort was well-founded.
And I well remember Climategate, which used the same tactic.
Quite damning if true.