It’s a starting point though. How often do you get to your answers immediately without having to go through some dead ends and wrong turns? That’s how learning works.
Everyone seems to be missing the part of the story where I actually got connections and introductions to others in the medical field and got an answer, and the part where an anesthesiologist actually gave me what turned out to be a pretty good guess at the answer because they DO understand biology in general better than me and hey do have to learn a lot about the immune system even if they specialty isn't vaccines.
My point was that the less educated someone is in the medical field in general, the less willing they seem to be to entertain a genuine question, and this is the opposite of being "pro-science". It's only a step above being an anti-vaxxer because they choose better experts to listen to.
> Eventually someone referred me to their cousin in nursing school who referred me to their brother-in-law who is actually an epidemiologist...
This could've happened if their cousin was a car mechanic who had a brother-in-law with an epidemiologist. The nursing aspect of the story was irrelevant to the end result.