They may not have the answers, but you would think they would have a better idea of where to look than someone with no medical experience at all.
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.)
Medical professions, the ones you interact with as a patient are essentially highly specialized mechanics for the human body.
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.