You're correct that almost all anti-vax arguments are nonsense. You are not correct about the political character of the scientific process, and the resulting problems that are introduced. It's the one argument the political right makes that has validity about the whole thing. They're just bad at making it, for many of the reasons that Davey outlined in his reply. A lot of the actors on their side of the fence have their hands out to those with agendas lacking empirical support, and produce poor outputs as a consequence. It doesn't follow that the general criticism is invalid.
As far as Paige Harden goes, the same types of criticisms have been levelled at Piketty, and that's the most influential work of the last decade in economics. Those criticisms are business as usual in the social sciences. Some of them are quite valid. Others are obviously self-defense on the part of those whose own prestige and funding would be threatened by general acceptance of his/her claims.
I can't think of a highly influential work in social science without empirical problems, and clarifying those complaints is how a large fraction of social science research gets funding. By taking Ford's money to do product research and tacking on their own political attitude questions, Converse et al ended up providing the rationale for the next generation (if not two) of political opinion research, as people tried to prove them wrong on specific points with greater and lesser degrees of success.
In the interest of keeping this on COVID related issues, I'll keep it brief. Largely we can agree to disagree. Science can certainly be politicized, but overall, I think it is less than you claim. That said, I do think fields like Economics and Political Science are more politicized than others--remember the repeated attempts by house Republicans to kill National Science Foundation funding for PoliSci and other social sciences?...that's about as political as it gets! I don't think, though, that COVID funding is highly political--a good proposal is likely to get funded, a quackery proposal is not.
I don't believe the right can rightly claim the turf that science is politicized as this whole concept emanated from far-left academics in the 80s, with the post-Modernists (e.g., Foucault),
Speaking personally, so an n = 1, I can say that in my field what drives funding is good proposals and good science, not the researcher's political views nor the topic that they propose to study. And I can say this confidently based on numerous experiences serving as Associate Editor for journals and serving on tons of NSF review panels. But again, just my personal experience.
