Oh man, I'm a bit ashamed of myself that throughout our entire discussion I hadn't once thought of the replication crisis in contemporary science. I had a course that covered that last semester quite thoroughly, including p-value-hacking to get statistically significant results. Well, so much for my university education.

Thank you for reminding me of it, you are absolutely correct that many research findings nowadays cannot be replicated when reproduced! If anything, it makes the need for a truly independently funded scientific agency more imperative. The publish-or-perish mentality nowadays is absolutely destructive for scientific integrity and makes researchers susceptible to publishing inherently biased findings.

Anyway, regarding your claim that I make an appeal to authority: although I agree with you in principle that:

Claim B is true, because Authority A says so

is a logical fallacy, some subjects (including medical science and pharmacy) are expert topics that require multiple years of dedicated study to get a good grasp of. It is idiotic to think that any layman can make the same informed judgements that a researcher can. The best we have is peers of said researcher checking the validity of their methods before and after publication. Hence peer-review (but as you pointed out, replication crisis throws that in the dirt)

Plato himself pointed that out when he asked someone if they'd rather vote on how a ship is steered or let the helmsman handle it.

Closely related is the argument from ignorance: because you don't understand how something works, doesn't mean that it is false. Or in this case, because a layman (including myself, I'm in the field of AI and CS, not biology) doesn't completely understand how mRNA vaccines work, doesn't mean that they're therefore dangerous.