The only thing "SARS-CoV-2" changed about science was how easily people could be convinced to accept pseudoscience in its place. The scientific method was abandoned, replaced with 150,000 fictional tales and 17 million ACTGs of random nonsense—fear-mongering disguised as evidence, not genuine discovery.
Genetic sequences are crafted to tell stories, not to reveal truths about nature. As Professor Edward R. Dougherty put it, "The accumulation of data does not constitute science, nor does the a posteriori rational analysis of data." In other words, piling up sequences and retroactively fitting narratives isn’t science—it’s storytelling.
Given this disregard for scientific principles, it's no wonder researchers find their work "soul-destroying"—more like an assembly line than a real, hypothesis-driven effort to explore nature instead of fictional boogeymen.
Source:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/four-ways-the-covid-causing-virus-changed-science/