You need to create models to predict what will happen in the future, which is what epidemiologist do.

While I agree that some people need to create models, it is very important to understand that not everyone is able to create them. For example journalists should not be able to create such models, they lack the knowledge.

Agreed. That is an important point. Let epidemiologist do the modelling, and use some back-of-the-envelope calculations to convince yourself of the orders of magnitude. It's super annoying that everyone who knows what a jupyter notebook is now starts blogging about their own modelling efforts.

Well, has there been any epidemiologists that have at least somewhat successfully predicted things, so far?

Atm it only takes a straight line through a couple of points to predict things for most countries, so I'd say yes.

The interesting question is whether they could help to implement useful political interventions based on which parameters matter. The answer seems to be yes in many cases.