Honestly, I consider myself fairly educated (I have a PhD in CS), but if the topic at hand is sufficiently far from my core competence, then reading the scientific article won't help. I keep reading about p-value hacking, subtle ways of biasing research, etc., and I realize that, to validate a scientific article, you have to be a domain expert and constantly keep up-to-date with today's best standards. Given the increasing number of domains to be an expert in, I fail to see how any single human can achieve that without going insane. :D

I mean, Pfizer could dump their clinical trial reports at me, and I would probably be unable to compute their vaccine's efficiency, let alone find any flaws.