>Would we encourage an epidemiologist to apply ‘fresh thinking’ to the design of an electrical substation? Perhaps we should treat with caution the predictions

>Would we encourage an epidemiologist to apply ‘fresh thinking’ to the design of an electrical substation? Perhaps we should treat with caution the predictions of electrical engineers about pandemic disease outbreaks. I kind of disagree with this point. The models we see are mostly statistical models. Anybody with a statistics background (mathematician, physicist, chemist, biologist, engineer, computer scientist, epidemiologist) can have enough of an understanding to make valid points. Discarding opinions based on somebody's background is an argumentative fallacy in and of itself. You should of course check if somebody is trustworthy, but epidemiologists should be scrutinized under this aspect like everybody else.