> The science around covid has been fluid this entire time. We aren't even sure if these vaccines will work against other covid variants in the future.
Science _is_ fluid by its very nature because it's a process, not an outcome.
But processes can be well-executed or not. Scientists, with all their human and institutional flaws, are still just so, so much more qualified than the lay public to make informed opinions that it's not even funny.
It's the same as with doctors: a medical second opinions is obtained from another doctor, not by yourself, because ultimately expert opinions may be challenged by others who have at least a similar amount of training and expertise.
Lay opinions have gigantic, brutal knowledge gaps. The gaps are so huge as to make lay opinions essentially useless.
I have spent an hour a day, every day, since the beginning of the pandemic, reading up on the scientific literature of COVID. I am overeducated geek with a computer science degree. Do you know how many reasonable assertions I can make about the pandemic? About as much as validating that the calculations behind the p-values of studies are correct, and nothing more. I can, at most, summarize and explain the high-level reasoning behind most epidemiologists' and governments's decisions, with the pros and cons that they themselves have suggested.
We are talking about over 600 hours of research as an educated layman and still no novel conclusions. To think that people who have spent at most a fraction of that time, with no university-level knowledge of statistics or basics of germ theory, can make reasonable assumptions, has no relation to reality.