Gregory's Server@makeworld For 18 months the WHO insisted COVID wasn't airborne based on erroneous received wisdom that had been copied into medical textbooks for so long that nobody had bothered to verify it. They ignored experts and modern research in favour of a citation-free assertion they'd all learned so long ago they couldn't even remember where, confident that it must be scientific fact.
Then it turned out that the source of that assertion had simply misunderstood a rival's research.
@makeworld actual science, raw science, the scientific method, all of that, are robust and verifiable and the most trustworthy thing we've got.
Science, as in the community of a flawed bunch of humans, operating within cultures and institutions, is absolutely not robust and trustworthy until and unless evidence can be provided. Groupthink, bias and logical fallacies happen just as much to educated people as to uneducated ones.