I watch too many news shows and one consequence is that I see way too many talking heads saying things for which they are unqualified to have an opinion on. The worst offenders are the MDs. Look, obviously becoming a board certified doctor in any specialty is hard and you are probably pretty smart, but it doesn’t make you qualified to say anything outside of your area of specialization. If you are a radiologist or an ophthalmologist say, absent any special training, like having a Masters in Public Health, the MPH, you will almost certainly know no more about vaccine trials, vaccine deployment or the epidemiology of a pandemic than your diligent reader of Scientific American, probably less. That a talking head has an MPH along with their MD is pretty much the baseline before you should even start to think that they are qualified to say anything about these crucial areas – especially during a pandemic. Yes, there are rare exceptions because of career choices like doing research in this area or working in public health and so “learning on the job” without bothering to get the MPH – Anthony Fauci for example(!) or Leana Wen come to mind. But if an MD is on a TV show or even working for the president and they don’t have an MPH, it’s best to treat what they say as being their opinion as a layperson. Start out by giving it all the credibility that you would give your doctor if they started talking about physics!
A particular annoying trait – for a mathematician like me – is when they talk about the statistics involved in clinical trials or the models of how a disease spreads. This is because the mathematics needed to say something intelligent about any of these areas is way beyond what most doctors ever knew. Almost all doctors for example, (odds probability slightly lessened by having an MPH but not cured) know essentially nothing about the statistics behind clinical trials – that’s why the biostatisticians design the trial and decide when there is a statistically significant result. While an infectious disease doctor or an immunologist are your go-to people for treating patients and helping to conduct a clinical trial on a vaccine, usually they know barely enough statistics to understand what the biostaticians are telling them, not to mention doing the statistical analysis themselves. I would be shocked if more than a handful of infectious disease doctors really understand what, say, the very common “Cox Proportional Hazards Model” is, or why it is a good test to use in a vaccine trial. Heck, I would give odds on a bet that most couldn’t begin to understand how you would actually do the calculation if you didn’t say, have a R program that gave you blanks to fill in with the data.
So my advice is: look at those chyrons to see if there is an MPH listed before or after that MD and be very wary if there is not.