> I have great confidence in the scientific method, precisely because it doesn't ask for my trust.
> The "scientific system" seems to be largely designed to obfuscate the implementation of that method.

You are just playing around the specific words I've used. No one asked for your trust. I just said whoever is unsure about what to do, their best chance at the moment is trusting the system that is based on science (the scientific method). And also transparency. (Well, actually at any given moment. Besides working on trying to improve it.) Yes, there will always be inefficiencies and politics, etc. But even with that, your best bet is that. Because the alternatives are worse.

> the underlying data used to produce the reports remains unavailable, and will remain unavailable

Is this unusual? I don't know, just asking. What I know is that the Russian one, that we have bought a few millions here, doesn't have an EMA certificate yet but they have published their results in The Lancet. Now you can say that's still not the raw source data, and I agree, though scientists say that it's very unlikely to be falsified (and they are under the EMA process now anyway).

> first time in my life that mainstream scientists and medical journal editors have expressed such consternation about a vaccine approval process.

Who and where? Not trying to downplay it, but since it is happening under pressure (from the pandemic) since it is thus unusual it's unsurprising that there will be public criticism from inside the community as well. Under normal conditions, if they were about to change the process e.g. in preparation for something like this, it would be just a simple scientific/professional debate that we wouldn't hear about.

> Why? When I can do my own research, access experts fairly directly, and make my own health care decisions?

You can make your own decisions, of course. Everybody can. But you can't do your own research. I mean you can, but it's naive to think it will not be significantly worse than what's being done by the scientific community. You are alone, they are many (thousands, tens of thousands). You have basically no idea or very little idea, they have spent their life learning about one or two of the sub-fields that provide knowledge for vaccine development and safety testing. And, of course, these guys are doing it full time now, while you'll just invest a couple of hours (days, maybe weeks in the best case).

I see a lot of smart people fall into this trap. There is a big difference in trying to understand the scientific results, the state of the art for the sake of understanding and between trying to somehow at some (arbitrary) level 're-evaluate' or 'check' the results and draw a contradicting conclusion. Verify whether all those science guys were right. You can't do that. I'd say that your chances are pretty slim, but I think in practice they are close to 0. Because you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you are missing out.

What you can do is try to make good decisions by trying to evaluate the the risks and the costs of the outcomes. E.g. you can say that getting a blood clot seems to be 1:167 000 from a vaccine (from the AZ one, but let's use that as an estimate for the others). You can get the numbers for the adverse outcomes for a COVID infection AND you can estimate your chance of actually contracting it. (Because the if you compare with the assumption that you get infected with a high chance then it's a no brainer.) Then you can adjust your behaviour, if it seems doable. E.g. you may be able to say that "OK, I'm waiting another year with the vaccine, because I'm not meeting anyone and not going to any closed public place, so my chances of contracting is really 0". That makes sense.