Expertise and Expert Authority

Public trust in both their government's ability to respond to COVID-19-like pandemics, as well as in their government's scientific agencies evidence-based response, has dramatically decreased during the pandemic, if representative public opinion surveys in OECD countries are anything to go by. 1 Giubilini and colleagues suggest that this can be (partly) explained by a lack of transparency and by these scientific government scientific expert agencies' refusal to publicly acknowledge uncertainty and disagreement among experts when that should have happened. 2Giubilini and colleagues are right to flag this communication failure, but it remains actually an open question whether or not that is the cause of their reported increase in vaccine hesitancy.Correlation mustn't be conflated with causation.While there may be good ethical reasons for why such uncertainty and disagreement among experts should have been communicated to the wider public, for one thing, it is actually unclear whether such a public concession would have increased or decreased public confidence in scientific advice or public health policy during COVID-19.It's also unclear whether the demanded transparency -when high compliance rates were considered crucial for infection control purposes by policy makers and the majority expert view -would have hurt or benefited compliance rates.Relatedly, and I note again that correlation isn't necessarily indicative of causation, Giubilini and colleagues lament that the COVID-pandemic policy response "exacerbated mistrust in vaccines," and link this to declining vaccination rates, implying that there is a causal connection between these two.However, taking their own references, their first one is explicit: "increased hesitancy did not translate into decreased intent to vaccinate with routine childhood vaccines or influenza vaccines." 3Their second reference