Re:The Death Of Expertise
by DenisM on Saturday January 18, 2014 @05:33PM
(#7082520)
I think you're confusing a celebrity and an expert. Your primary care physician is an expert, but not a celebrity. We know that much because he is credentialed by a fairly reliable system. Celebrity status is simply one different way to ascertain expertise, and it's not that reliable - there are plenty of famous shamans, such as that guy with the debunked autism-vaccination link study.
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That's apples to oranges. A physician goes through a rigorous training and licensing process before they can practice medicine. There's a base level of proficiency and ongoing continuing education requirements to be a physician. There is no such process for the nebulous and ill-defined field of "public policy" which could be stretched to cover just about any facet of daily life.
I therefore can only judge a self-proclaimed public policy expert based on what I can find about them. My cursory google search revealed no interesting papers written or talks given. Only a bunch of short, shallow blog posts.
Andrew Wakefield owns a patent on a single-measles vaccine, which would be a competitor to the MMR vaccine, and most people who are aware of that suspect that's why he published that shoddy nonsense about autism in the first place.
In other words, he is very much an expert on (at least) the vaccinations in his study. His celebrity came later.
He's salted the earth though - antivax crowd would denounce his vaccine with as much pique and passion as they have dished on MMR. It just doesn't look like a good business plan...
The anti-vaccination groups didn't exist at the time, so it's quite likely that Wakefield was just as startled by paranoiac monster he'd nurtured as anyone else. No member of the public (before or after Wakefield) actually knows anything about vaccines, other than the story about the Swine Flu vaccine killing more people than it saved... since any individual member of the public does not need to care about vaccines very often in their lifes, and therefore has little direct personal advantage in knowing more, vaccine safety is a very fragile exercise in blind trust.
Ironically, those who have lived and breathed vaccines for years (i.e. experts) seem to know nothing about that enormous trust placed in the vaccination process by the public---the public assumes it works and assumes it's there to keep you safe, but knows so little about them that even simple questions of safety will be translated into "vaccines bad."