Science has always been political. It has always been corrupted by money. The same goes for all of human existence. Anything that involves people is, by it’s very nature, political. To think that Science somehow exists in a vacuum, a btilliant bastion of truth, unpolluted by the vagaries of human nature, shows a severe lack of awareness.
My father was a scientist and researcher, starting in WWII, studying methods for culturing anaerobic bacteria (like what would be encountered after battlefield injuries). I remember him lamenting how politics drove research funding, and how corporate and government grant money, not the need or the basic thirst for knowledge and understanding, drove scientific academia. So this is nothing new.
There is still lots of essential basic science research going on, unfettered by politics and money, but most of it rides on the coatails of large grants and other funding with political underpinnings.