Generally, I agree.
However, my experience is that many people do not appreciate the limitations of their methods. Science corrodes not necessarily because of the efforts of politics, but of the human nature to succeed in the face of doubt and adversity. We have a nature to make a bold claim and throw ourselves out into the ocean with no land in sight.
The first person to claim he could detect a virus without a microscope did so within a limited laboratory setting. Later, seeing that work, someone else made the bold claim they could devise a means to affordably test the whole population. When compounded with scientists who have grown up thinking their methods of sequencing the dna of pathogens is rock solid science, who is going back to the old ways to verify that the extensions and extrapolations have not imploded?
I have an old friend - something like a sister or even fraternal twin (we had experiences I can only describe as psychic as teenagers) who now works high enough in a state health agency that I knew her state's financial situation with regard to said health agency.
And I called her on it when she was talking up the vaccine - that the state was doing it for money to balance the budget and that she was putting a lot of trust in companies that wanted immunity from suit (she would not enjoy). Of course, she enjoys a bit of a cult of personality because she is quite capable and the brain drain rallied to assault me for denouncing her.
But it got under her skin.
She knows the people around her are a brain drain and that she's less sharp today than she was when we were teenagers and having debates until 2 in the morning. But… she worked hard for that position - practically created it and gets rewarded in pay and guest in ways I won't because I can embrace aceticism.
As Nietzsche put it: "The victory was that of the scientific method over science." Or something to that effect.