My very firm belief is that many "official experts" have at least 4 big problems/weaknesses when it comes to making decisions and communicating with the public.
* They're trying to optimize for 2 (sometimes) contradictory problems: getting the right answer AND maintaining their job/power. A random bloke on the Internet just is trying to optimize for 1 problem, getting the right answer: any other considerations like fielding off hungry young political competitors or maintaining corporate stock prices so you stay in their good graces aren't factors in the slightest to a random well-intentioned smart guy on the Internet.
* They are very smart at their field of expertise, but they're specialists and not generalists. They are very bad at considering second-order effects outside of their narrow field of expertise. Something like a lockdown in some city might indeed immediately save 1,000 extra people from a Covid death. Any risk-benefit analysis and deeper consideration of that lockdown on other problems such as drug/alcohol abuse and overdose deaths, suicides and hopelessness and depression, obesity increases leading to many health problems and deaths later on, deaths caused by missed cancer screenings and other medical problems, loss of freedom, or its economic impact and long-term impact on society isn't even a consideration by officialdom. Maybe 1,000 people are saved to kill 2,000 and cause even further societal problems. Yet those 1,000 deaths saved would be characterized as a win and proof that lockdowns work because no other factors can be considered. I'd strongly argue that a smart engineer or CEO (professions who are trained to considering multiple factors and tradeoffs in complex decision-making) would be better suited to make these kinds of complex societal decisions than a scientist focused on a narrow field.
* They're frighteningly bad at normal risk-management calculations. One could make a very reasonable argument that a normal fit 0 to 40 year old shouldn't get a new vaccine which has no long-term test data for an illness that statistically has a very low risk for them: and many people are reasonably making that risk-management calculation. Yet many experts are rushing into advocating vaccines even for children despite no long-term test data. The risk management calculation for a vaccine in this circumstance is completely different for the old and young, yet no consideration of this is allowed.
* Even when they sometimes get things right, most of what what even well-informed members of the public hear from the experts is filtered through the media. Unfortunately, outside of a handful of decent journalists who are reasonably smart and understand nuance (and who are mostly shunned from mainstream outlets) there is no collection of stupider people on the planet to try and analyze complex subjects or ask scientists real questions.