Is science the last bastion of truth in the western world?

To tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me science.

Has become somewhat the new slogan of the internet crowd. Everywhere you look you find people quoting this study or that piece of innovate research. Everyone is backing up their arguments with their favourite scientific research that vaguely says this or that other scientist that said something slightly different. People calling out for “numbers” to backup arguments.

Numbers never lie.

Is another slogan bandied about. Fortunately this is true: numbers never lie however, something that is often forgotten is that numbers are manipulated. Who does the manipulating? Definitely not the numbers.

What will happen when this bastion starts to crumble? When we realise that even science is manipulated by corporations. And in fact science has been influenced by industry. Since the 60s or even 50s? Since the 40s:

To this end, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company created a Medical Relations Division and advertised it in medical journals. Reynolds began paying for research and then citing it in its ads like Philip Morris. In 1946, Reynolds launched an ad campaign with the slogan, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” They’d solicited this “finding” by giving doctors a free carton of Camel cigarettes, and then asking what brand they smoked.

This is also described in a documentary found at Arte.tv. Big business is simply doing “research” that backs up their claims. Regardless of how absurd this research might seem, it provides an opposing opinion that is grounded in the scientific process.

This discredits the science community as a whole and leaves everyone else with a big FUD headache. We are all worse off.

Undone Science

And it even gets worse. There now is a concept of “undone science” - science that doesn’t get done because it doesn’t getting funding. Mainly because it is science that doesn’t look likely to make money in the future. So basic research isn’t being done because either there is no way of making money with it or no way to patent the research results.

An example of this, are vaccines for viruses such as Covid.