It's a little perplexing to me that we're getting evaluations from spy agencies and the Department of Energy. I know the latter specializes in nuclear energy in particular, and this has experience with proliferation and adversarial information-gathering.

They also supervise biological weapons laboratories (presumably for the same reason), but what they're being asked to do here is to validate a premise (natural or engineered?) whereas their actual expertise is in tracking pathogens already known to be weaponized. This may be why they expressed their findings with “low confidence”, which is mentioned in the WSJ report but given less weight than it deserves.

A big problem in the pandemic response is that there are powerful strategic incentives for people to express a false degree of very high confidence about this , and indeed many other topics, so as to maximize insecurity and anxiety across a large population, which makes it easier to herd. This was an issue prior to the emergence of COVID-19, and strongly correlated with a drop in vaccine uptake and localized outbreaks of infectious diseases like measles that were previously considered easily managed under existing public health regimes.

See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30138075/ for a quantitative treatment of this issue.