Sigh, the title might as well be "Iranian/Russian/North Korean kangaroo court concludes...". It might well have been a lab leak, or it might have not been, but half+1 of the panel already knew what conclusion they're going to reach before they started the work, and this is a discussion of politics and not science.
What incentive does a House of Reps Subcommittee have to get it wrong? That is, why can some government inquiries be trusted to be approximately good-faith scientific inquires, whereas others (perhaps this one) cannot?
(I ask out of genuine naivety to US political research/processes/inquiries)
My main reservation for not buying the outcome of a house panel is qualification. These are just elected politicians. How are any of us supposed to trust that they can grok science? The whole thing would have to come at ELI5 level simplicity.
It depends on who’s running it. If it’s started by a bunch of science deniers who are bitter about losing a fair election and they solicit testimony from conspiracy theorists, you shouldn’t expect more than politics.
If it was started on more even grounds and based on testimony by domain experts with traceable evidence, etc. it’s a lot more reliable. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect - e.g. past testimony on Alzheimer’s disease would have reflected the scientific consensus skewed by Eliezer Masliah’s fraud – but it usually won’t be out of line with what experts in the field agree.
This is why the gold standard government reports are prepared not in the legislature but in dedicated agencies where the people working on them are not political appointees. If NIH or the EPA releases a report, it’ll often be peer-reviewed and will list the people who worked on it and their qualifications – usually advanced degrees in the subject and often a research career prior to becoming a civil servant.
Nobody is above politics but if something is started for political reasons and the people involved are all politically motivated non-experts, you’re only going to get political pieces. If it’s run by people who have subject matter expertise, they can still have political opinions but they’re probably not going to embarrass themselves professionally by taking outrageous positions.
As a concrete example, Republicans made vaccination a highly contentious political litmus test. A lot of doctors are Republicans, but that lead to most of them staying quiet or making very moderate positions – the few exceptions being noteworthy because they represented such a small minority of their peers.
The house panel is more interesting than a North Korean kangaroo court say because most of the virus research which may or may not have caused covid originated in the US and China. The Chinese aren't saying anything much so that leaves the US and the house panel has been about the only body that has been able to compel people to testify. For example Peter Daszak was one of the main funders of the WIV (Wuhan lab) and so you'd want to ask what did you fund but he was replying that he can't say anything because he had a confidentiality agreement with the lab not to disclose. The house panel however had the power to make him testify in spite of the non disclosure stuff so it's been able to get better information.
