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Yeah, unfortunately all of the 'cites' are just the single giant unsearchable e-mail archive, or Slack archive, and the quality is marginal enough that OCR and scanning for individual quotes kinda sucks.
I'll see if I can get find a better breakdown later today or tomorrow for the relevant quotes, their context, and their timing, but it is fair to say that the ones more open to serial passage or lab-tied zoonosis are usually earlier in the discussions. If all Andersen et all had done was to emphasis that as the less likely cause by March, I think this would have been more reasonable. But that's really not how he was behaving publicly.
The Slack post from Andersen laying out those three possibilities that's gotten the most attention was from April 17th; this (cw: giant image, bad formatting) is most of the relevant surrounding context, though it might be easier to just download the full PDF and look starting around 3/4ths of the way down. I think Andersen is being far too clever by half when he defends his surrounding behavior; the Slack messages were responding to the cable allegations, but there were a lot of other reasons he cited contemporaneously for even considering a serial passage option (Shi's sequencing, past bad biosafety practices, the furin cleavage site stuff), and there were other matters that were known at the time, many of which dated back to late February, none of which he seems to consider context.
Andersen et all were also pretty aggressively slamming against any form of lab connection publicly throughout this time period; it's not like the paper was a one-and-done, or even the first thing, nor the last thing.
I think the problem from Andersen et all is... well, the reason I linked this in the secondary post. The centralization from NIH grants, along with the general limitations of academia, has kinda made the entire field a little incestuous; even to the extent Andersen's work itself isn't tied to strict-definition gain-of-function research, he's constantly interacting with and eventually going to have his grants okayed and papers reviewed by people who do or did or plan to in the future.
((Beyond that, I think Andersen's highly negative response to Tom Cotton is, as much as the simple Red Tribe Blue Tribe, downstream of Cotton's "America First" perspective, which would matter more to his lab. But that's still an honest disagreement of perspectives; Andersen didn't go into international epidemiology research for the dollars.))
That's true, though it's a very wide definition of 'fine', here. Still, compared to situations where people were actively canceled or defellowed, it does allow for more serious discussion.
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