The sciences are subject to the same political and economic realities as the rest of us. There's an ideal "hard science" that is removed from such but what qualifies exactly or not does often become very subjective. Proper science can also lead to conclusions which are patently incorrect.

Of course there's also tendencies towards orthodoxies of thought in the sciences. You see examples of that in the reactions towards things like "flat earth theory" or geocentrism or whatever. It's worth nothing that both of these can be valid scientific models assuming a lack of information we now have. I think adherents of both are ignoring obvious realities about the world that make the models unworkable but the discussion surrounding the model and how to falsify or prove them is very useful.

Most people go into the sciences with certain assumptions and never question them. It's an obvious fact to us that the earth is round but if you can't explain why we know it is round you aren't really holding a scientific belief just repeating what you have been told. It's quite easy to prove the earth is round yourself if you learn how. That is useful.

With more obscure topics, like the existence of dark matter. There's orthodoxies of scientific thought especially in journalism that fails to get the nuances. There's good reason to believe that dark matter exists but all experiments so far to try to identify what it is have failed, it exists as a hole in our models, and while it's rational to look for something to explain a discrepancy in an otherwise workable model, there comes a point where you have to consider the model to be wrong if you cannot find a solution.

It's possible our understanding of science isn't as good as we think. Each generation thinks they know better than before but we will always lack the full picture and we always have the potential to be dead wrong about things. Especially when it comes to the boundary of science and philosophy.