Lol. You trust them because they agree with your preconceived opinions. If someone else made a long post with lots of references saying that vaccines worked (you know, like the thousands of trials and studies which do exactly that), you would ignore them.

Part of the issue with thinking that watching YouTube videos is somehow comparable to a medical degree and decades of first hand experience and ongoing education (apart from, you know, being an insane opinion), is that you can't even appreciate the disconnect between the two positions. Let's address the topic of reading and analyzing, since that is the one you brought up.

There is more to reading literature than just firing off lists of papers which you have hastily Googled which you think support your cause. You need to learn how to critically analyze research, weed out low quality case series or retrospective cohort reviews, pick out clear and hidden biases, assess the methodology, look for flaws in study designs and protocols, search for conflicts of interest, find any reporting errors, data errors, analysis errors, statistical errors, assess whether the data support the conclusions, the list goes on. Not only do anti-vaxxers not know how to do this, they don't even realize it is a process which should be done or even exists, which explains why they think a Bitchute video or some far right conspiracy blog is somehow "good evidence". It helps to explains why Spartacus is confused about why good quality trials show no evidence for the treatments he thinks should work based on poor quality trials. It explains why he links papers which are irrelevant to what he is talking about, mistakenly thinking they support his opinions, and why he links papers which make a very good case for vaccination. And it explains why anti-vaxxers are so impressed by a list of references that you have not read which do not support the points you think they support.

I have never claimed to be an absolute authority on anything, but I know how to read and analyze data and reach logical conclusions based on that data.

I know when we were paying for our house to be built, rather than go to a certified architect and then take the plans to a registered building company with decades of experience, we instead hired some guy who had never designed or built anything in his life but had watched a lot of vlogs. It was far cheaper! The fact that I am now living in a pile of rubble is irrelevant.

We know that if you have severe COVID then you are more likely to suffer from one or more long term sequelae. We also know that if you get vaccinated, then your risk of catching COVID is significantly reduced, and if you do still catch it, the severity of your disease is in general significantly reduced.