Box 2.

Who are the experts? And where are they?

The expectations from experts were huge and not reasonable during the COVID-19 crisis. Rapid and valid responses to all kinds of pressing questions were expected from citizens and health authorities. However, especially at the start of the pandemic, the knowledge was insufficient to have responses to many of these questions, but experts were pressured to give their opinion, taken too often as grounded on solid evidence while it was built from limited observations and weak hypotheses – if not from common sense and gut feelings. Different scientific disciplines (e.g., epidemiologists versus virologists) competed for interpretive authority regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Surprisingly, all subfields of science had scientists who published on COVID-19, often venturing far from their field of expertise (e.g., physicists or mechanical engineers) [22]. Many scientists who published on COVID-19 epidemiology had no training in epidemiology and public health surveillance methods. For most of the “experts” who appeared prominently in the media, there was a worrisome disconnect between claimed media expertise and actual population health science expertise [23]. Identifying relevant experts who could be trusted was a major problem, notably due to the growing distrust of scientific institutions in charge of public health surveillance activity. This calls to strengthen the autonomy and credibility of scientific institutions producing surveillance evidence, first, through adequate staff training in epidemiology and surveillance methods and, second, by maintaining a separation between these institutions and governments using this evidence to design policy. One must learn from the failure of the CDC on COVID-19, in part due to political interferences [24]. Highly credible scientific institutions are also necessary for experts from different domains to work together, despite different and evolving views on the evidence