mere civilians like us can never verify anything like a bioweapon, that we have no chance of verifying ourselves, so everything we believe about these things is based upon the logical structure of who we trust and find credible

well idk about that. The sequence is out there, y'know? The papers about how to make viruses that aren't classified have been published. Sure there's probably some classified stuff but there's a lot that's not. We can do some amount of investigation ourselves even with little expertise.