Honestly, the answer to the question "is field x less rigorous" is almost universally no. Some fields tend to attract smarter people than others, but that does

Honestly, the answer to the question "is field x less rigorous" is almost universally no. Some fields tend to attract smarter people than others, but that doesn't mean there aren't very smart people in pretty much every field who are doing good work and exploration at depth. For this question I think that beyond the politics and what was a deeply ill-advised strategy for managing a limited resource (masks), it may also have to do with the type of studies they tend to use and give authority to. The scientists you're talking about probably are looking at smaller scale things where plausible mechanisms are investigated and confirmed. Epidemiologists though have many examples in their toolkit where such common sense findings don't extrapolate to population level interventions. For whatever reason, epidemiology doesn't seem to embrace a more bayesian approach where you operate with a good guess and try to revise it as you learn more. They tend to stick to confirmed models.