Yes... That is a very big tell. Has that contrarian actually worked in the field and done the research? Have they run clinical trials with hundred to thousands of participants? Have they sequenced hundred of genomes and carefully parsed the data?
If they haven't done the work... The basis for their contrarian views is much more suspect. There are reams of research on so many topics, cherry picking a few studies requires one to go back and reevaluate the possibilities. And most don't do that.
So much of it is rhetorical nonsense. And bear in mind that in the modern era of social media, what happens is NOT a case of "did my research," it works like this:
a) poison the well with a disparagement of the prevailing consensus as being either done by "bought and paid for" people or cite something terrible as an after effect
b) quote a CONTRARY VIEWPOINT from - in almost every case - a recognized quack who just happens to have the word "Dr" as a title
c) feign umbrage that the only reason this quack has been so-called is because he/she did the "research" and nobody else did
d) insist "I'm just asking questions" while citing the credential of the quack.
Even the folks saying "I did my research" didn't do any actual research, they just clicked a link that told them what they wanted to hear.
AN EXAMPLE OF WRONG SCHOLARSHIP FROM MY OWN MASTER'S THESIS
I'll try to keep it brief, and while this isn't science, it's proof that what sunk Claudine Gay at Harvard is rampant in scholarship, a refusal to check out sources and find plagiarism. (Before anyone thinks I'm picking on Gay, the fact is that using their definition of plagiarism, most Ivy League faculty are guilty).
I wrote my thesis at seminary on the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7 in the KJV). For nearly two centuries there was a story accompanying how this extra phrase that "proves" the Trinity was inserted into the Greek Bible by Desiderius Erasmus, a claim that he had promised to insert the passage (which was in Latin but not Greek) if a manuscript having it could be found - and immediately one was, so Erasmus upheld his promise and also wrote a 90-word suspicion that this manuscript had been written solely to refute him.
Despite being told in seminaries and every other religious area that deals with this for over two centuries, it never happened.
In 1980, a guy named H.J. DeJonge, the world's foremost scholar on Erasmus, who had read him backwards and forwards, revealed his findings: this never happened, but we've all told this story since at least 1818 and T.H. Horne. DeJonge was clear that Horne was honest enough in his writings that it was obvious he didn't invent the tale. My own research showed that the claim goes back to at least the late 18th century and a man named Porson. I'm not claiming I made some fantastic discovery and settled it, my conclusion was simply that the date we know it began can be moved backwards several more years.
Here's the point I'm making: within Text Critical academia, this story had been told by every single person who had ever written on the passage, regardless of their religious bent. The Christians, the atheists, the liberal theologians, everyone told and believed that Erasmus HAD made a promise and fulfilled it. But nobody - until 1980 - ransacked Erasmus' works to determine the accuracy of the claim. It turned out to be false. And Porson died in 1808, so we're talking for two centuries nobody bothered to check out the work.
This stuff does happen.
Of course, what we saw with the Covid vaccine was STARTING with a reasonable objection ("My concern is the rapid development of this vaccine"), which I always suspected was poppycock. It was proven to be so when all of a sudden the same people who FIRST hid behind "polio was developed over time, it's been tested, this is different" turned into "no vaccine works, ever."
Have you ever noticed the people who say "but the jab causes myocarditis" don't ever look at how many people who CAUGHT COVID HAVE MYOCARDITIS????
Just like the "vaccines cause autism" people never bother to explain how people who never had the shots also have autism.