Science on Trial?

I, like most other scientists (especially of the retired variety), only feel really comfortable with our own area(s) of specialism (often only a little bit of the substantial range of subject matter), getting increasingly less confident, as we move further and further away from that zone. This is not to say, of course, that we might not have views (some informed by our training and experience) on these more remote issues but we generally defer to specialists on those topics. I have been deeply unhappy with a tendency by some politicians, in recent years, to regard the opinions of 'experts' (who presumably were well-read about the issues and were trying to offer a 'balanced' view, supported by the majority of their profession) as being inferior to their own (generally self-serving?) 'gut instincts'. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, I was therefore somewhat gladdened that, at least, expert opinion seemed to be back in vogue, with politicians apparently deferring to scientists. Having watched developments, however, over the last few weeks, I have been increasingly concerned about how frequently government expert opinion did not seem to fit with my (albeit non-specialist) assumptions (about e.g. the origins of the virus; the relevance of the concept of 'herd immunity' to disease control, without a vaccine and the urgent need  for substantial numbers of PCR and antibody-detecting tests to track infection in our population). They, in deed, also did not fit with what was written by other non-government scientists in our country or in different parts of the world. Our government-supporting experts are presumably highly intelligent folk, so I cannot believe that the strategies (many used by other countries) that were originally rejected, before becoming our new norm, did not occur to them earlier. If that is the case, one must presume that our country's initial outlier status (doing things differently from everyone else) was the result of political calculations. Science has to tell it how it is (or at least as the majority of informed specialists believe it to be) or it's of no use to anyone! There is a danger that expert opinion will prove to be a 'moveable feast'.