That's probably not true. Based on the charts here [1], it is safe to say that at least 20-30% of successful NSF grant applications have political/ideological terms used in the abstract.
Maybe more importantly, it's really hard to know how much research isn't being done or published because of the current political climate.
> And then COVID happened, making everybody an armchair epidemilogist overnight.
Well, I don't see that as a bad thing. Blind trust in authority isn't an admirable quality in my books. Also, the other option really was to become an armchair epistemologist. You had to somehow make decisions.
> Science is political
But it shouldn't be. At least not this much. We have choice to encourage or discourage that.
[1]: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/increasing-politicization-and-h...