You're right that insulin price has nothing to do with science, but rather economics and societal institutions/policies. The trust in the institution presenting the science is important. The purpose if science is to answer questions in fact objectively through reproducible observations. Telling people not to ask reasonable questions and just "trust the science" is appearently antithetical to people who understand the process.
Then there is the fact that someone can be a respected scientist in e.g. linguistics and simultaneously a crackpot in e.g. quantum physics, or vice versa. So you need to be careful even with trusting the actual scientists. (Similarly, the doctor talking about covid... is he an epidemiologist, or does he just fix broken legs?)
Trying to think about best solution to make the actual science accessible to average people... the "ask science" subreddit is probably the best currently existing option.
The problem is when these people try to public support certain government policies. Knowing climate science or quantum physics does not qualify you to be a policy maker. It does qualify you to inform policy makers on your narrow area of expertise.
I've seen a lot of scientists pull appeal to authority fallacies by saying, I'm an expert in X and I say the government should do Y. Most people aren't scientists but they are smart enough to know that scientists don't know everything and usually not any more adept at politics or government than anyone else.
Politicization of science by scientists has done more damage to the public trust in scientific institutions than anything else.
Disclaimer: I have not read anywhere near every news article published on either topic, and if you want to make the case that the media is presenting a consensus different from scientist's, that would be worth looking in to.
Moreover, my understanding of the actual science (and it's hard to say for certain because again, science is complicated and institutions distort) is that natural immunity performs at least as well as vaccine immunity (and maybe even quite a lot better), but a lot of people are (perhaps understandably) upset at "vaccine passport" policies which don't make exemptions for the naturally immune. Moreover, "the science" i.e., the media, governments, etc seem (or at least seemed--I haven't kept up with the issue recently and perhaps the media has finally picked it up?) very reluctant to talk about the merits of natural immunity. So even in what seemed like a slam-dunk, happy path where "the science" and the actual science seemed to align, the picture seems plausibly distorted. :(
- Someone who has been vaccinated is several times less likely to catch it than someone who has not.
- Someone who has had it and gotten better is several times less likely to catch it again than someone who has been vaccinated but has not caught it yet. (This is one definition of "natural immunity.")
- For some reason, many registries won't count a positive test followed by a negative test as evidence for immunity.
The first two are clearly laid out in the Israeli study and are what I'd call "the scientific consensus," gathered by reading what actual scientists are saying. I'm lost at the jump from the first two points to the third because I can't see why it's done that way. The media is not completely silent on natural immunity, I think I saw one article about the Israeli study somewhere.
Just go see how well the ruling class is treating the doctors that are actually fighting covid on the front lines, showing it's a treatable ailment, saving lives. Since their perspectives don't align with Team Elite's clear agenda (inject everyone, boosters forever!), they are ridiculed, shamed, relegated to alternative or "low status" press.
You’re confusing economic class and social class. PhDs might not be rich, but they have a much elevated social status compared to the vast majority of the populace.
The professional class are the foot soldiers of the elite class. I subscribe to the view put forth in “Disciplined Minds,” a great book on the subject.
This is why we talk about peer review including the scientific community, not the community of all people. It is an elite group with specific skills.
In general, I think questioning (within reason) government and other institutions helps weed out bad policy and hold them accountable.
There are political decisions that cause it to be ruinously expensive in the US. The messy bit is where science necessarily interacts with politics.
That anyone, after the past couple years, could think that the elite are in any way well-meaning is absurd--I think the most charitably you could interpret the data is that they are so incompetent they shouldn't be trusted to judge a high school gymnastics competition.
When it comes to the scientific institutions, I think Horton, current editor of The Lancet, sums it up well: "The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."