Religion is utterly malleable and not infrequently used by pathological scammers to defraud people
I could say that about every other aspect of human life. Since everything can be used for fraud. Science in the same way as religion.
We both know that is, what always happened and what will continue to happen. Arguing in this way, I as well could say that scientific institutions are as much corrupted as the religious institutions are corrupted.
That would not make neither science nor religion superfluous.
Insofar as that is true, it is because of scientism that accepts the pronouncements of a priesthood without testing them. Science isn't such faith in experts. The scientific method is the opposite of such faith, the skepticism that impels us to seek to falsify and test what we are told. You are absolutely correct that scientific institutions are corrupted in this way. That was one of the more devastating facts I was confronted with regarding Covid, that the prestige of institutions with centuries of demonstrable integrity had been leveraged to mislead us, and those institutions were corrupted and no longer demonstrating that integrity that requires adherence to factual reporting of data attained by seeking to falsify hypotheses. NEJM, JAMA, and similar institutions pandered to political narratives because polities intent on pushing jabs into the arms of everyone in the world were their source of funding, and flatly lied about covid and the jabs to keep that funding, those grant monies governments and foundations dole out to enable research to be done.
However, this is absolutely contrary to the scientific method, and is demonstrative of the degeneration of science and it's corruption by the same mechanisms that have degraded politics and financial institutions by Machiavellian masters using every means at their disposal to gain more wealth and power.
And certainly not all religious institutions have suffered such corruption. Yet, the more venerable and authoritative, the widest reaching and most influential, are ubiquitously because those have been preferentially targeted because of those features and their longer duration has subjected them to more attacks. I would have far more expectations of integrity from a local church preschool program than of the Vatican, for example. Similarly, few scientific institutions have resisted corruption. The BMJ comes to mind, as does the TrialSiteNews, while individual scientists that have refused to abandon their integrity have been strongly censored, libeled, and sanctioned in every way politically corrupt institutions could undertake.
This isn't science. Anthony Fauci infamously exclaimed 'I am the science!', but that isn't true and is contrary to science itself. It's rather treating science as a religion, venerating priests in lab coats, and substituting dogma for dissent, faith for skepticism, the very opposite of data integrity and testing hypotheses to disprove those that are false, because doing so enables pathological liars to mislead victims.