> Anybody with a political motivation can ‘take down’ climate change, vaccines, or even a tound earth.
And this is a good thing because the first two things on that list, given the impact it has on the living style population, must be discussed publicly. Politics exist precisely to address those kind of broad impact topics.
The last and lasting blow done to scientific credibility was precisely about the so-called vaccines. A barely tested medical product based on a tech that never worked previously released by a big company known for corruption was decreed to be "science", all while changing the definition in dictionaries to make it a "vaccine". No discussion on the subject even by experts was tolerated, the big internet companies erased opposition and some governments went as far as stripping basic rights (movement, expression, business) to citizens, all in the name of science.
The fact is, this isn't a data-based or scientific approach at all. It's only power-tripping. A data based-approach would have shown clearly about 3 months in the crisis that the population at large isn't even at risk. Explaining to the population the risk ventilated by age would have been 100 times more scientific than the fear-mongering broadcasted continually on TV. Science needs to be used as a justification carefully, and using it dogmatically for pushing something that was ironically not even scientifically proven to be effective nor without risks (I'm pretty sure the newspapers in my country never reported the thousand or so dead directly imputable to it) is the exact opposite.