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Scientists just provide data and options. It's still true that the measures slowed down spread. That it didn't do it enough to justify putting the measures in place or not is more a matter of policy.
Same thing applies to climate change. Scientists provide the data that the climate is warming up. That it appears correlated with certain human activity, not all human activity, only some. And that the current prediction models show X, Y, Z effects in the coming future if the trend is not reversed.
Then politicians need to take that into consideration, and decide what policies to apply or not. Ignore the data and predictions? And possibly gamble that the harsh consequences will come, or put measures in place, which will affect the short term, but possibly avoid the predicted outcomes, alas also possibly be inconsequential because it wasn't enough or it eas too much, or there were other unknown factors at play that the models had not realized were there. Etc.
They can’t, by definition, that’s why in those cases what ends up happening is the politicians just rubber-stamping policies set up by scientists/experts, as a matter of fact this past pandemic has just put that whole process in the spotlight.
Scientists are not philanthropists and always need justifications for their funding