Why would you expect a nurse in a COVID ward and an anesthesiologist to have strong answers on this question? Vaccinology is laboratory science. My son works in a vaccinology lab; as far as I know, nobody there has been to med school.
My point is more that these people have far more medical education than the average person I interact with on social media, and didn't look down on my question but also wanted to know. People who knew less than them and knew even less than me were mad that I would dare even ask.
I don't work on operating systems but I had a CS education, so I know enough about the kinds of things it needs to worry about that I could answer about the building blocks of a kernel in a way that I feel would be largely correct.
But a neat thing about HN is that there are people here who've been to med school and can presumably chime in.
What I can tell you personally is that vaccinology seems to involve a lot of centrifuging of rabbit poop, which is something I don't think they do a lot of in med school.
Getting the perspective of the software engineer is a reasonable step, and certainly better than basing your beliefs on the rankings of the insane person.
Of course, if you have access to a vaccinologist (is this a recognized profession? I checked two dictionaries and neither contain the word), you should ask them. Or you can look up their opinion online [1]. Most will agree what the doctors and nurse said.
[1] https://health.mountsinai.org/blog/esteemed-vaccinologist-we...
Now I see where you’re coming from with the suggestion to go straight to a qualified source instead of asking a bunch of random people.
Point being, it's not that straightforward unless there's someone you already know that is willing to share their contact information and they actually have the time to talk to you.
I totally see the point about going for second-best first until you know you have a question worth their time and not something that's obvious. (Although the answer in this case did seem obvious to me as a software person, or at least I'd have guessed they can see the amount of anti-covid-stuff dropping at different rates.)
Contact the department of health education of the ministry of health. You already paid for it with your taxes, might as well make use of it.
It's a feature of engineering and scientific education that there is a corpus of knowledge that every person in a discipline (say EE, or medicine) is expected to have learned (if not retained). I imagine all doctors learn quite a bit about the immune system in medical school.
Given that a "random software engineer on the street" may have a CS degree, an MBA, a 6 week bootcamp, or be totally self-taught, the example isn't analogous IMO.
If most of the whole world came to a screeching halt for the better part of a year and the solution turned out to be GPU drivers, I as a software engineer would become intensely interested in understanding them and would not at all be surprised if my less technical friends asked me for some pointers.
In the end, my point was that people who aren't even software engineers were telling me to stop trying to understand GPU drivers because GPU drivers are a solved problem and I should just trust NVIDIA.
A) can come across as a statement in the form of a question (e.g. "no we don't these vaccines are rediculous" etc) B) even if it doesn't, if you ask that and no one knows and other people see that, it can cause them to have unscientific doubts about vaccines, even if that wasn't intended.
It’s like asking a car mechanic about steel production. Entirely out of their wheelhouse, even if they deal with the steel daily.
(Both could comfortably tell you masks don’t cause hypoxia or pneumonia, though.)
The point is that the nurse and the car mechanic are at about the same starting point on the subject.
Being willing to learn is great, but they have minimal extant knowledge from their profession.
My point was that the less educated someone is in the medical field in general, the less willing they seem to be to entertain a genuine question, and this is the opposite of being "pro-science". It's only a step above being an anti-vaxxer because they choose better experts to listen to.
> Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist...
This could've happened if their cousin was a car mechanic who had a brother-in-law with an epidemiologist. The nursing aspect of the story was irrelevant to the end result.
Medical professions, the ones you interact with as a patient are essentially highly specialized mechanics for the human body.