[psychiatrist24]

"What good is information without knowledge? What can a random citizen do with a medical study but shrug and say "I guess?"

A lot of people have knowledge, they know maths, they may be doctors, they may know doctors. And they can learn the same way doctors or experts learn. What exactly enables experts to understand a thing, and not "random people"?`

Even if you are not a doctor, you can check a study to see if basic aspects check out. For example I saw a study promoting mask use, but it was based on an experiment with hamsters. So personally I would say that is interesting, but not quite enough to force billions of people to wear masks.

You can check if they do randomized trials and so on. You don't need to be an expert to do that. Or you can check who wrote the study (like "Wuhan lab for genetic experiments on viral diseases" that finds it certainly, under no circumstances, originated in a lab), lots of things you can do without being an expert.

Do you trust experts? There is actually research that shows you shouldn't, in general (not just for Covid).

[luckylion]

> What exactly enables experts to understand a thing, and not "random people"?

Mastery of the domain. Yes, any random person (of sufficient intellect) can become an expert in any topic for all intents and purposes. But it takes a lot of time and effort that they'll have to devote to it. I don't think it's reasonably to expect that everyone will be an expert in everything, and it definitely isn't efficient.

With lots of things, you can do general plausibility checks, but you'll miss essentially all of the non-trivial issues if you're not experienced with the methodologies and tools. It's like asking somebody with no programming experience to judge the merits of some architectural choice. They won't be able to make an informed decision and you can't present a complete picture of the intricacies and implications in a 30 minute talk.

From my experience, your average general physician can't tell you a lot about viral infections beyond what you can learn in 30 minutes on Wikipedia. And that's miles away from being able to actually judge vaccines, or the usefulness of masks. What they typically do is rely on experts that write guidelines and recommendations.

[psychiatrist24]

Many people spent much, much more than 30 minutes thinking about Covid by now. Many have been in lockdown for over a year now. Every newspaper article they see, every TV show they see, every discussion people have is about Covid.

Even the experts did not have more than a year to thik about Covid yet.

Also people don't have to understand everything. I don't understand enough about mRNA to give you a medical explanation of the vaccine, but I can perhaps understand statistics of the outcomes of the vaccination.

For vaccines and masks, they should provide statistics that show they are effective. If they don't have them, they should launch studies to provide the data.

And even having independent experts be able to validate the claims by the authorities would be valuable.