A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics.
Yep. And it's about damned time.
Case in point - the 1984 NIH Consensus Conference on Cholesterol. After decades of scientific studies that had persistently shown no relationship between saturated fat in the diet and heart disease, a carefully packed government committee, ignored the results and declared a "consensus".
And proceeded to sentence millions of americans to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc.
But it's taken 20 years for the story of how business interests manipulated the research, the grant funding, and the peer review process, to ensure that evidence exonerating healthy animal fat, and placing the blame where it belonged, on sugar, refined carbohydrates, trans fats, and industrial seed oils, never made it into the discussion.
It was so much easier to control the process, back in pre-internet days, when control of the committees and control of the media made sure that dissenting voices were never heard.
Pales in comparison to the DDT ban, which has killed around 100 million people in the Third World; also the result of junk science.
You can add the magically disappearing hole in the ozone cured by banning R-12 Freon to that list. It was the practice run for GoReBalWarMinG!!111!!!eLeBiNtY!!!111