>But if their function is "professor at university X", my gut feeling tells me that they might like the public attention a tad too much.
This is a very interesting perspective, which is very different from my own. Being in the US, my attitude is that officials are usually chosen based on criteria other than their skills in the domain they are administrating, and I would expect the best knowledge on any subject to be found among low-level people who deal with it professionally. I am also suspicious that officials might prioritize maintaining public order over disseminating true information, which caused many unnecessary deaths during the Spanish Flu.
>I would prefer to not get these from some journalist writing his tenth article today.
That's true enough. But I would rather have information from front-line experts than administrative officials.
Second that, I would love to hear from the frontline guys. But I don't. It is either elected officials (fair enough, that's part of their job) using input from said experts.
You don't hear from the frontline people / orgs, I assume because the are simply too busy right now. Which brings me back to the professor acting basically as a free agent. That should change.
The professor is the front-line guy. I'm talking about epidemiologists, not physicists. If he wasn't acting as a "free agent," then you would be back to hearing from elected officials, who are mired in compromises and not entirely trustworthy.
This is a very interesting perspective, which is very different from my own. Being in the US, my attitude is that officials are usually chosen based on criteria other than their skills in the domain they are administrating, and I would expect the best knowledge on any subject to be found among low-level people who deal with it professionally. I am also suspicious that officials might prioritize maintaining public order over disseminating true information, which caused many unnecessary deaths during the Spanish Flu.
>I would prefer to not get these from some journalist writing his tenth article today.
That's true enough. But I would rather have information from front-line experts than administrative officials.