STEM professionals ask Nature to retract COVID-19 lab leak paper

Re:STEM professionals ask Nature to retract COVID-19 lab lea... by baja_blast on Monday July 31, 2023 @03:18PM (#36947481)

The emails and slack messages are indeed authentic. None of the participants involved have ever denied it probably because doing so under oath would put them in legal risk. But luckily for the participants their misconduct has been largely ignored outside of right wing outlets, despite the fact the lead authors joking about how to mislead the press NYT specifically.

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Re:STEM professionals ask Nature to retract COVID-19 lab lea... by eesmith on Monday July 31, 2023 @03:47PM (#36947807)

"largely ignored outside of right wing outlets" because of pieces like "Everyone should be skeptical of Nate Silver: And anyone touting the lab-leak 'theory' of COVID's origin at this point" at https://theracket.news/p/everyone-should-be-skeptical-of-nat... .

> 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.

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