Some of this is a conflation of who the experts are, as well as hindsight bias on that question. If you look at say Fauci or Trevor Bedford's predictions, sure

Some of this is a conflation of who the experts are, as well as hindsight bias on that question. If you look at say Fauci or Trevor Bedford's predictions, sure, they were pretty accurate (with some confusion in the middle of the pandemic when everything was confused). But if you take Rand Paul as your "expert" (also a medical doctor, but in a different specialty), you would've had a very different sense of what "the experts" were saying. And in the moment, you don't have the benefit of hindsight to judge the credibility of expert predictions, only their credentials.