I'm not an epidemiologist, but I've written code for people in various fields. I knew code, they knew the domain. All of them knew things that I would have fucked up, if I had tried to write the code with just my programming knowledge and my big brain, without their domain knowledge and experience.

A university education teaches you something.

I assume that epidemiology is like the other university fields — when lay people come and show that the epidemiologists are wrong about epidemiology, they're about as likely to be right as the people who write to maths professors claiming to have found a method of trisecting an angle. And the people with the novel claim and the missing education bear the burden of proof.