I follow the science and trust the experts, but let’s be honest: They don’t always get it right.

For instance, we recently learned that although public health experts had told us repeatedly that the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were equally effective, that’s not actually true. Half a dozen studies, the New York Times reported, now show that Moderna offers more protection.

And that’s just the most recent screw-up. Don’t wear masks, they told us in the beginning, until they changed their minds. COVID-19 is unlikely to be spread by asymptomatic people — oh, oops, yes it is. Wipe down your packages — um, no, actually that’s not necessary.

A few days ago, irked by the most recent turnaround, I suddenly recalled a book I’ve had on my shelf for the last 37 years. Titled “The Experts Speak,” it is a nearly 400-page doorstopper written in 1984 by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky that claims to be the “definitive compendium of authoritative misinformation.”

Navasky and Cerf set out to lampoon the world’s experts by showing how wrong they’ve been over the last 2,000 years about everything, including, they noted, facts, theories, dates, geography, predictions about the future, conclusions about the past and, yes, even assertions about the present.

“We are ready to concede that the experts are occasionally right,” they wrote. “As a matter of fact, some of our colleagues have argued persuasively that the experts are right as much as half the time.”

OK, they were being snarky, but their compendium is no joke. Here are a handful of the thousands of entries:

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau,” Yale economics professor Irving Fisher said on Oct. 17, 1929, just a week before the market crash that devastated the U.S. economy.

“Roosevelt will be a one-term president,” wrote political columnist Mark Sullivan in the New York Herald in 1935. Roosevelt was elected to four terms and died in office in 1945.

“[Copulation] is … dangerous immediately after a meal,” wrote Dr. Bernard S. Talmey in his treatise on the “science of sex-attraction” in 1919.

“A man-made moon voyage will never occur regardless of all future scientific advances,” said Lee DeForest, an American inventor who has often been called the “father of the radio,” in 1957.

“Clearing and colder, preceded by light snow,” was the official New York City weather forecast for March 12, 1888, the day of the blizzard of ‘88, which killed more than 400 people.

“For the majority of people, smoking has a beneficial effect,” Los Angeles surgeon Ian G. Macdonald told Newsweek in 1963.

Their message is clear. Don’t believe everything you hear, even from someone with an advanced degree. Furthermore, even when the experts all agree — they might still be wrong.

But having said all that, what’s the alternative?

No number of wrong assertions by a scientist or expert truly undermines the value of study, knowledge, experience, experimentation, data-gathering and the scientific method. And just because the experts make mistakes, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t right vastly more often than they’re wrong, or that they don’t know a lot more about viruses than you and I do.

What we sometimes forget is that science and expertise don’t exist in a world of perfectly discernible truth and objectivity, but in one of uncertainty.

Sure, I now wish I’d gotten the Moderna vaccine rather than the Pfizer, but data evolve (and Pfizer is effective).

Nicholas Goldberg is an associate editor and Op-Ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times.