Is the idea that they believed it was plausible before writing the paper, became convinced it was implausible during the writing, and then later switched back to plausible?
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These are indeed the contortions people are going through. Basically, as the evidence for zoonotic original allegedly mounted and lab leak origins became less convincing, suddenly the Proximal origin authors become less convinced of their own arguments. Astounding.
I think Prof Francois Balloux, infectious disease epidemiologist, summarized it well [1]:
I'm not convinced there’s a villain among the PO authors, but just a series of cock-ups and poor decisions, aligned with, and fuelled by, bad incentives, eventually engulfing everyone in its wake.
It remains an embarrassing institutional failure, however we look at it.
I disagree with those who try to rationalise their content and pretend that the authors changed their mind as they followed the science (sigh).
There was never any new real evidence that could have triggered a change of opinion in that time period, anyway.
The charge that the final version of Proximal Origins in Nature Medicine does not accurately reflect the PO authors’ doubts expressed in private feels fair to me.
Indeed this is what happened according to the chats. Check for example the posts on April 3rd.
This whole conspiracy theory relies on selective omission of context from the messages (I refuse to believe that Silver, Chan and co. are doing it out of incompetence). And of course nobody actually checks a 140 page source document. This also explains why no serious journalist has picked up the story. They do actually read sources.