There is one sentence in the paper this is about (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) that I th

There is one sentence in the paper this is about (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9) that I think overstates the conclusion: > we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible But the paper itself really isn't about any type of lab-based scenario, the actual content only applies to an engineered virus as in the hypotheses that this is either a bioweapon or an experiment that accidentally escaped. The hypothesis that this could be a virus collected for the lab and then accidentally released can't be addressed at all by the paper. To me this is more like clumsy writing, but I can understand if you read this as a paper overstating its conclusion. But it's really not something that would mislead anyone even quickly skimming the paper. The parts Nate Silver complains about look to me more like the kind of difference you'd expect between internal, informal chat and what you write in actual publications. I'd expect scientists to speculate wildly at first, then collect data and evaluate what that data actually means.