Essentially it all boils down to what the media publishes. You won't know about a study that goes against their narrative and you'll never have the opportunity to check the data because you don't know it exists
That's not true. You can go straight to the sources. Large medical networks publish data all the time, such as Mayo, Johns Hopkins, and Cleveland Clinic, and there are a plethora of medical journals, many of which have been quoted here. There's also the false premise that all media has the same narrative. There's more than one agenda, and by checking multiple news sources, you can find almost anything published. If you only check Fox News or CNN, you're right - you can't trust a good chunk of what you read.