Corruption: A study debunking vaccines by a scientist in the pay of trial lawyers was found to be “an elaborate fraud.” Meanwhile, the “Great Garbage Patch” turned out to be a sea myth. Science has some explaining to do.

Scientific inquiry, once perceived a noble redoubt of objective truth-seeking and enlightenment, is doing a bang-up job of dragging itself down to P.T. Barnum-style snake oil-elixir hype, given the amount of fraud being exposed almost daily.

Of course, mistakes happen in any field of inquiry, but these are politically motivated ruses intended to advance an agenda.

A 1998 British medical study linking autism to childhood vaccines by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, published as fact in the prestigious Lancet journal, was exposed by a rival as a fraud. According to an investigation from U.K. medical journal BMJ, Wakefield misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 patients in his study.

BMJ concluded there was “no doubt” of his responsibility.

More fakery arrived from the other side of the world, too. After years of alarming claims about a “Great Garbage Patch” of plastic bottles and bags floating around the Pacific in a space twice the size of Texas, an Oregon State University professor of oceanography, Angelicque White, found the actual size of the supposed horror was “grossly exaggerated.” Instead of taking up two Texases, the floating landfill’s size was about 1% of that state’s bulk.

Claims that the ocean was filled with more plastic than plankton, and that the garbage patch was growing tenfold each decade since the 1950s, were also found to be rubbish.

Philosopher Eric Hoffer once asked if there was any greater freedom than the right to be wrong, given the prevalence of nonsensical notions within free societies. The freedom to be wrong on science, however, is frequently driven not by mere mistakes but by a political agenda whose aim is to diminish the freedoms of others.

Wakefield has had his license pulled for his vaccine study, which he published while in the pay of trial lawyers who planned to sue Big Pharma, but not before his ideas became common wisdom among the smart set.

In recent years, thousands of parents have refused vaccines for their children, to the detriment of public health. Measles, mumps and rubella cases have all risen among children since Wakefield’s scam, taking public health back to the levels seen in P.T. Barnum’s day as well.

As for the “Great Garbage Patch,” the professor’s debunking didn’t arrive before plastic bags were banned in big cities and a generation of kids got guilt-tripped by their teachers with tales of the earth being swallowed in an ocean of trash unless the bags and plastic could somehow be stopped.

These aren’t the only examples of politically motivated junk science taking on the clothing of respectable science. In 2007, Lancet published a phony study claiming vastly exaggerated war deaths in Iraq that later was found to be false. The aim there was political as well: to stop the U.S. war in Iraq.

Also in England, purloined e-mails of supposedly respectable climate scientists at the University of East Anglia showed evidence of a concerted effort to cover up data unfavorable to their global warming thesis, as well as venal efforts to silence and discredit anyone who came up with authentic data contradicting their pseudo-theology disguised as science.

In all these disgraceful cases, storied pillars of the scientific establishment — whether in scientific journals like Lancet or in great universities — wrap themselves in the color of disinterested, objective inquiry and fall flat when their political agenda is revealed.

It’s a threat to science as real as that of al-Qaida to soldiers.

It has much to do the presence of government in science. Government controls who gets funds, and its minions tend to be on the left, which tends to drive cash and other recognition to those who go along with government’s agenda. Prestigious journals go along with it for the same reasons. The only loser is the truth.

So now we see an almost continuous stream of big epic science discoveries — on vaccines, war deaths or global warming — that support a short-term cash or government agenda at odds with truth.

That’s corruption, and so long as it continues, it’s a threat to future discoveries of real merit as well as to our freedoms. Daylight helps, as does transparency-encouraging critical websites, such as Steve Milloy’s junkscience.com.

The burden ultimately must be born by science itself to purge its growing wave of junk science sold as truth.

Distancing big government from it is a good first step.