Much more abstractly, even if everyone had perfect motivations, it's science's role to be progressively less wrong over time by invalidating faulty hypotheses/theories but almost never to be conclusively correct. Any claim that we understand how or why something works should be taken with a mountain of salt. Claims that a certain observation were made are usually much closer to actual science than any claims of a conclusion.
For example, Aristotle (generally a very influential and intelligent man) believed scallops emerged spontaneously from sand because of the limits of what he could observe back then. The observation itself wasn't wrong as far as the absence or presence of visible scallops, but what he didn't realize was that there was an entire system that he couldn't observe with the tools at his disposal, and this ignorance lead to an incorrect conclusion.
Even Isaac Newton, who forever changed the world with his work on physics and calculus, was an alchemist as well and had some weird ideas about how to treat the plague of 1665-1666 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/02/isaac-newton-p...). These were also born out of observation and Newton just doing the best he could with the tools he had at the time.
Overall, I believe it's both important to believe in science and scientists (even in the face of those cynically exploiting the system), but also to realize that even at its best, scientific information is ultimately about observations, not the ultimate truth of systems, even if that's the unattainable goal of science.
For example, Aristotle (generally a very influential and intelligent man) believed scallops emerged spontaneously from sand because of the limits of what he could observe back then. The observation itself wasn't wrong as far as the absence or presence of visible scallops, but what he didn't realize was that there was an entire system that he couldn't observe with the tools at his disposal, and this ignorance lead to an incorrect conclusion.
Even Isaac Newton, who forever changed the world with his work on physics and calculus, was an alchemist as well and had some weird ideas about how to treat the plague of 1665-1666 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/02/isaac-newton-p...). These were also born out of observation and Newton just doing the best he could with the tools he had at the time.
Overall, I believe it's both important to believe in science and scientists (even in the face of those cynically exploiting the system), but also to realize that even at its best, scientific information is ultimately about observations, not the ultimate truth of systems, even if that's the unattainable goal of science.