You say you will trust the experts, but what happens when experts believe something else and are silenced? It's easy to say "all the experts agree with me" when all the experts who don't agree with you are silenced, discredited, or fired. And now four years later all the experts are saying they got a lot of stuff wrong but they were "working with the information they had at the time". That's a pretty bogus thing to say when other people were trying to show the information they "didn't have" and were silenced.What this comes down to is epistemology, or how we think we know things.
I am of the view that we know things through accumulation and interpretation of evidence, and lacking evidence on a given topic, or if I lack the expertise and time to find and evaluate evidence on a certain topic, I will trust experts in that area.
You seem to be of the opinion that nothing can be known and everything is corrupt. In areas where the evidence is as unequivocal as it could be (e.g. vaccines and autism), you claim that the evidence cannot be trusted because of corrupt actors. That is an unfalsifiable position that is not really worth debating. You trust your intuition and internet "research" over the advice of experts and professionals because you believe everyone is out to make a buck off you. Your combination of cynicism, nihilism, and hubris leads you to believe that your opinion on these matters is as valid as that of anyone else, no matter their level of expertise.
Probably not much point in continuing this conversation. We can keep it to sports over on the other boards.
And yes I'm cynical. I lived through covid and the way they were reporting it and what I lived were completely different. If you're living in a pandemic you don't have to be told you are. If the government would have decided to keep covid a secret and never even mention it, I would have never had a clue there was a "dangerous pandemic" going on. They could have said "the flu this year is worse than normal" (they've said this a lot in my lifetime) and I wouldn't have ever questioned a thing. I bet no one who lived during the Spanish flu could have said that. But I guess maybe I'm just lucky and everyone else watched people drop like flies around them. Anyone who had the luck to live that reality I sympathize with and I definitely wouldn't belittle their opinion. But the reality I lived suggests we got duped and a lot of people got rich.