The biggest way that I think the reputation of the science community is being harmed is that it's not holding true to it's own tenets. The only way to discredit a paper is to falsify it's claims. Not to call it "irresponsible" or "immoral", label it "disinformation" or "pants-on--fire".
Bad science gets proved wrong, but nobody is interested in reproducing results. As a result our journals are full of accepted papers documenting unreproducible crap. They have been for a long time. When COVID hit and we needed science to be clean and authoritive, it was already in disarray. Unable to tell us what actually worked, we just got a bunch of folklore from all sides some of which got "blessed" by the high priests and some which was "sacrilegious", but very little of it was backed up with any data beyond modelling (which is just predictions).
Nobody should be claiming the high ground w.r.t. COVID IMHO. The science community failed us by acting in response to politics and not science.