> How much time are you going to spend learning enough virology to make your own decisions in this case?If experts in various fields could be trusted to just tell the truth about what they've found and not try to spin it or filter it, their information would be much more useful. It's precisely because the average person cannot trust experts to just tell the truth about what they've found that it's so hard for average people to get information they feel they can trust.
Also, being an expert in virology, for example, does not make a person an expert in human psychology; but trying to spin or filter your information about virology (or anything else) based on how you think people are going to receive it is a human psychology problem, not a virology problem. And if spinning and filtering scientific information was viewed, as it properly should be, as a matter of psychology, it would be much more obvious how manipulative it is--do you really want so-called psychology "experts" spinning and filtering the information you get based on their model of how human minds work?
In short: your implicit assumption that I, as a non-expert in a given field, can just trust the experts to tell me what to do is wrong--dangerously so. If the decision really matters to you, you take the time to learn enough about the field to at least be able to apply some intelligent common sense.
> How much time are you going to spend on the tens of thousands of other fields that you need to understand in order to make your own decisions?
You don't need to take time to learn tens of thousands of fields in order to apply intelligent common sense to your everyday life decisions, or even to decisions about something like COVID. Intelligent common sense just about viral illnesses in general, which should be common knowledge to any adult in a first world country in the 21st century, should have been enough to tell people in the US, for example, to wear masks and social distance around the end of February 2020, which is when my wife and I started doing it. If it's really true that a majority of the US population is unable to exercise that much intelligence and common sense, then our society certainly has a problem, but "just trust the experts" is not going to solve it, it will make it worse.
> what do you do for a living? Do you make decisions that affect others?
Not in any way that requires me to communicate information to others, no. What I do does affect others, but only in the sense that my work, which is in a technical field, has to be done right in a technical sense.
That said, I should be clear that my comments about what public officials should do are made from the viewpoint of a citizen, not from the viewpoint of an official.