Furthermore... they love to throw the word "Science" out there when they are not even remotely following the scientific method:

You have hit the nail. the problem lies in a society that still does not understand what science is and believes that the scientific method is a way of obtaining the "absolute truth of things", when in fact it is the only method we have found to prevent our infinite stupidity takes the reins when describing the world around us.
As a scientist, I can tell you that the work consists of creating models, basically mathematical, that describe "what is observed" within certain parameters and very particular conditions. Once this model has been built and accepted by the scientific community, the next step is to demonstrate where the model fails, because the only thing one hundred percent certain is that the model is incomplete and wrong. it is always possible to create a model that better describes what is observed around us.
There are serious limitations in scientific models, and we consider them scientific precisely because we accept that they are imprecise from their origin. One of the greatest limitations is precisely what we define as "what is observed", that when our capacity for observation becomes extremely faithful to reality, we are only evaluating or capturing a tiny portion of the essence of what is happening or of the object.
thus our models in the best of cases end up describing more or less in an acceptable way that one percent of what we are able to "observe".
human stupidity makes us believe that we are capable of "observing" the object one hundred percent of its nature, and also that models are capable of describing what is observed one hundred percent. That's what social media does today, magnifying its stupidity with "the facts." that is, what they are capable of observing.
Society needs to be trained with a scientific mindset, recognizing that scientific models are fallible, and that a 60-year-old model of how a pathogen is distributed is just that, a model that must be improved, and that is surely insufficient to explain what is observed with new technologies.
I do not even want to imagine how limited a vaccine model can be that does not have any data or "observables" beyond what a group of "scientists" (vendors) have been able to imagine on their own for their clinical trials. .