Realistically, the vast majority of people will not have a real chance to "refute" or even evaluate scientific claims. Maybe given a lot of time and foundational work to learn the field, some percentage of people can usefully think about them, but the vast majority can't. A lot of people are functional illiterates. They will pick based on trust and gut feelings either way.

For example, when deciding whether to give your kids certain vaccines or not, you really can't expect that new parents will read the primary literature and try to refute or confirm the conclusions based on the numbers and will trace through the citations and so on... Any of those claims will also have some online account on social media refuting it with equally scientifically sounding words. In the end it will come down to heuristics and your model of how the world works, which set of people operate with what kind of intention. Like maybe you know people working in the field who you trust and hear from them that generally this sort of stuff can be trusted. Or maybe you had some bad experiences getting screwed by "the establishment" (maybe even unrelated to medicine) and now you lump all this together and distrust them.