[thu2111]

I don't like appeals to authority, but this perspective that people who have spent their entire lives studying epidemiology have just got this all wrong, don't understand what they are doing, and that appeals to "common sense logic" will reveal the truth ... really irritates me.

That's very understandable but I doubt your view would survive contact with the epidemiological literature.

It's really hard to believe I know, but epidemiology papers are all terrible. They seem to always contain basic errors that any lay person can spot, and peer review doesn't catch them, nor does the editing process at supposedly prestigious journals. I've read a lot this year and by now I go in to a new paper being sure I'll encounter something stupid or crazy, because the rate of problems is just so high.

Remember that the only people who study epidemiology their whole lives are in academia, a place where being correct is less important than being published. Although it sounds absurd, 2020 has convinced me that epidemiologists and public health researchers in general know absolutely nothing about disease. They are however very good at closing ranks and claiming nobody outside their little cliques should be allowed to criticise or question them.

More generally, this is really basic epidemiology, and I don't understand why you think it's so useful to question this stuff in this way.

There's nothing basic about the claim you just made, and I'm really curious now if you yourself are an epidemiologist. Because you've gone from asserting that epidemics aren't susceptible to "common sense logic" to saying it's obvious and common sense that lockdowns/masks - which have no observable impact on case curves for COVID at all - will have outside impact on influenza.