There has always been the bias of inertia.
A new idea is proposed, pooh-poohed, the proponent attacked, the evidence overwhelms, the idea is accepted, and the people who attacked the original proponent take credit for the idea they pooh-poohed while the idea becomes the new orthodoxy. For instance, it was Abraham Ortelius who created an atlas in the 1500s and noticed the continents could fit together. In 1912 Alfred Wegener proposed that they may have been connected, and provided fossil evidence to show it (only he couldn't explain how they moved apart). In the 1950s there were reportedly fistfights in the aisles at the IGY convention over Continental Drift, but now Plate Tectonics is widely accepted, as geophysical data provide an explanation for the continents moving.
Only now, there is a lot of money involved, far more than back when, and the Internet won't allow the people pushing nonsense to back down until they have their vacation homes paid off and enough boodled up to retire. Prestige is not just a reward, it is a weapon. But Ortelius, a Cartogrtapher, and Wegener, a Meteorologist, proposed over a few hundred year span, with others, something that would not be accepted within their lifetimes.
In the meantime, the unscrupulous 'adjust' and bury data sets to the point that it's hard to find clean data to refute their stuff, or examine their data to see if others can see what they saw (repeatability of results is a big thing) even as they build a library of flawed studies to quote in subsequent papers (which makes for an impressive, if sometimes questionable, array of references and footnotes).
One of the most interesting projects I have ever undertaken involved backtracking through 'source studies' (the ones quoted in the next round of research) to find the first study which claimed to show helmets were needed on motorcycles. It was published by the Army in 1947, and concluded that dispatch riders in combat zones were safer wearing their helmets.
The folks who embraced that concept for civilians on the highway used a myriad of angles and some really sketchy mathematics on occasion to support their foregone conclusions, but never seemed to ask the right questions. They even dealt with the helmet in "the crash phase" as if that was part of every ride, but never addressed if the helmet actually contributed to the wreck happening in the first place (restricted peripheral vision, sweat in the eyes, attenuated hearing, rider fatigue from wearing it going down the highway--all assuming it fit well--and the transfer of impact energy to the cervical spine which might cause other fatal problems.) Instead, focusing their query on head/skull/facial injuries, which were actually far down the list of bones broken ( IIRC, number nine).
Amazing, but a human tumbling at 60 MPH will do an awful lot to protect their head and face, and never pointing out that direct impacts with fixed objects at some point are not survivable, helmet or not (which is why arms and wrists are fairly high up that list of orthopedic injuries).
Science should be looking for the correct answers, not just ways to prove a point. To do that you have to follow quality evidence, scrupulously gathered and not altered capriciously, and above all, ask the right questions.
