Yea agreed. When shitty science is given as a reference then it becomes much harder to critically judge something but at least it is not a huge amount of work to see that there is conflicting scientific data on a topic. It is a huge effort to try to gauge which one is more credible. And it does not even have to be agenda driven. It can just be bad science, science driven by strong priors. Then you really have to be an expert on the topic to be able to spot the weaknesses in thay study. Luckily however most outrageously stupid statements made by politicians don’t refer to science and are easy to pick apart by realizing the.blatant contradictions in their statements.