I do not claim to know whether this is true, but according to Mullis, he watched his own technology (PCR) be misapplied to diagnose disease, and he watched sloppy science get rushed out to meet a social and political demand for an answer to AIDS. The money, press, and public would rather have an answer than take the time to prove the answer correct. He said he watched nearly all his colleagues shoehorn their unrelated research into AIDS-related research, because billions were being doled out, as well as status and fame, all because the political class, media, and public wanted to believe there was a known cause and therefore clear research to be done to cure it.
Mullis maintained that no one had yet figured out what caused AIDS. There were some theories, some with fewer problems than the HIV theory, but none of them were free from contradictory evidence in the real world. He said, however, that public science cannot abide the very thing science is supposed to do best; questions. It needs answers. Incorrect theories that provide clear action steps, even if they lead to broken outcomes, exist and persist.
The history of science and medicine confirm this. Theories have been believed and acted upon even while making the problem worse. Over and over and over.
The odds are incredibly, ridiculously slim that that is not happening right now with almost every theory. The more public and political the health or science issue, the greater the odds that the theories funded are incorrect. The incentives are just stacked too far against the truth, which is usually something like, “We don’t really know what’s going on, but sometimes this helps some people.”
This is why science tends to progress in sudden, violent lurches, instead of the smooth linear path you might expect. Incorrect theories are prematurely turned into gospel by the scientists with the best political skills because the incentives to have an answer are so strong. This means falsifications and superior theories face an incredible battle and require a massive cataclysmic shift and/or changing generations to break through.
PS – One of the more interesting things I came across was the many cases through history of healthy sailors at sea for months (long after the incubation period claimed by viral theory) suddenly contracting the flu at the exact same time as people on land a thousand miles away. This has been observed and studied for several hundred years, and to date, no mainstream viral theory can explain it. Therefore, all current viral theories must be incorrect or incomplete. How unsatisfying.