Everybody must "do their own research." There is no alternative.

No matter how dumb you think you are, you still have to make your own decisions. Even if your "research" is just to figure out who you choose to trust, that decision itself is 100% yours.

Trusting the authorities on non-controversial stuff is usually ok, but society goes mad from time to time and trusting the authorities where there is widespread disagreement turns out to more often than not (in my 53 years of experience) to be the wrong decision. Authorities don't act from a drive to find the truth regardless of consequences, they act from other drives, for other reasons, that are complicated and complex (fitting in themselves, pleasing the people with the most money, etc) but generally are NOT scientifically driven towards the truth (and do not speak for science no matter how much they claim to). Anyone who says "I want to reassure you" is immediately untrustworthy. Reassurance is the biggest give-away that they are a running a confidence game.