[spanktheuser]

My priors include none of the agencies having expertise in epidemiology.

[jandrewrogers]

You are wrong, something that you could have easily checked yourself. There are many sophisticated epidemiology groups throughout defense and intelligence. It is a longstanding critical part of their mission, for a variety of end purposes.

[Fomite]

While I am very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis as an infectious disease epidemiologist, the DoE has a fair amount of expertise via the national labs.

[oa335]

Can you please share the reasons why you are skeptical?

[Dalewyn]

My priors include all the agencies (the Intelligence Community, arguably the deep state) having ulterior political and personal motives. Does noone remember the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax that the CIA cooked up for GWB?

I would not trust any of these agencies to provide objective findings or conclusions, there is a lot of power on the table that's at stake.

[the_why_of_y]

The CIA did not cook up the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax. Paul Wolfowitz had to create an entirely new intelligence agency with hand-picked analysts to get that result, because the existing agencies refused to make that claim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans

[Paradigma11]

The CIA was very skeptical about the WMD story and there were lots of leaks that made that clear.

[ioulaum]

I feel that that could've been an honest mistake too.

The intelligence networks there were weak, and if people were talking about it, they may have assumed wrongly that there was something there.

Politicians hunting for excuses to do what they already want to do though, is definitely a thing.

[tucnak]

Everyone is a Bayesian these days; it's become so fashionable to throw "priors" around like it means anything.

[calf]

My prior includes neither agency can provide genetic analysis which would be the easiest way to convince a professor of virology that this theory has any merit.

[User23]

Why would you think that?

It's obviously false if you just think about it, but you can also do some searching if you need some authority to tell you.