The appeals to authority are a response to the flood of online discussions by people that are confused by what “doing research” means and suffer from Dunning-Kruger. I don’t want to read any “just asking questions” comments about COVID or the vaccines unless the people have years of experience working in the field prior to the pandemic, because it filters out the armchair experts that we have so many of.
What’s funny to me is that not everything evokes this much scrutiny as vaccines. Why do relatively few people care about what they’re putting into their bodies via the products they find at the grocery store vs a jab in their arms?