This last one wasn't even close. The CDC straight up lied about vaxxed people not spreading the virus. The knowledge they had the same viral loads as unvaxxed had been around for months. I trust pre-prints more then the CDC now (don't trust pre-prints they haven't undergone any review).
The peer review process is a joke. I trust preprints just as much as peer-reviewed studies.
Which is to say:
1) I read carefully, evaluate the methodology, assume authors are spinning for "high-impact" research, and believe results only once they've been replicated a few times by independent researchers using different methodologies.
2) I use results I haven't vetted like this in a probabilistic way -- they're often good for best practices, or identifying risks, but not as sources of ground truth.
