Thread by @magi_jay

This is just how scientists talk. "It is inconsistent with evolutionary theory" *only* entails 1. they have a theoretical model concerning viral evolution & 2. there are features of this virus that did not match that theory. This happens in biology & other sciences *all* the time

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1401914109407502348

Andersen went on to research the unique features of the virus and then their theory evolved. There is no conspiracy here. Andersen's letter to Nature Medicine explains their thought process. nature.com/articles/S4159…

https://twitter.com/magi_jay/status/1400899040909434883

Go onto google scholar. Read some of the articles on viruses, genomes, classification, etc. Scholars are tweaking their models & their data analyses *all the time*. Researchers spend their entire careers arguing about the classification of specific viruses & evolutionary models

Just skim these passages. You don't have to understand all the content. But pay attention to the framing. "Here's something we don't understand. Maybe this model will account for it."
Then go back and read the Fauci-Andersen exchange.
Doesn't seem so odd now, does it?

Go back & skim Andersen's *own* work in which he discusses the unique features of SarsCOV2

And realize just how ridiculous it is to assert that a scientist would risk their personal reputation to suppress info about a virus that they knew would be widely studied

Also, it is not odd that Andersen said "crack pot theories." It's like if a person were doing research on mice, said "this mouse's survival is inconsistent w/ my model," & was then asked if this inconsistency was evidence that his research team was building an army of Uber Mice

Finally, @NBCNews did a terrible job paraphrasing & quoting the email. "Some of the features look (potentially) engineered" is *way* more assertive than what Andersen actually said, which was more along the lines of, "if you look really, really closely, this is something strange"

Yes, it's a direct quote, but the removal of the context changes both the tone and meaning. I'm not being nitpicky.