by your admission the person you are referring to is an engineer in a highly specialized field and is likely to be skilled at probabilistic inference as well as dissecting (certain types of) scientific publications.

I do have some special knowledge in biological research, from seven years of post-doc work at the Max Planck Institute for Computational Biology. We're the group that created the standard of care software for HIV treatment, and for a time we hosted the global influenza database. In other words, viral disease was a specialty of ours.

In my view, as someone with some high level expertise in the field, is that the original poster is correct in their assessment.