Since science doesn’t say that at all, your question is silly.
The odd thing is that Luke does not say it was Malta, he wrote that it was Melita – which is where the deadliest viper in Europe lives in large numbers. How anyone got “Malta” from “Μελίτη”, which in Latin letters is “Melitay”, has got to be weird.
So it isn’t a lie according to anything, it’s a total screw-up by translators. Jerome rendered it as “Militene”, which is not the Latin for Malta, so he can’t be blamed. The KJV has it right, which should have had weight with all later English translations just as many other terms do. The American Standard version also got it right, along with a couple of others, so this probably isn’t a case of picking a place name you know that kind of sounds like the original name and using that (which is all too common) since if the KJV folks got it right then people knew back then that it wasn’t Malta and as late as the ASV it was still known as not being Malta. That modern translations such as the NIV and the NASB get it wrong when the vowels are not at all compatible with the original word – a_a in place of a_i_e – is a travesty.
The problem isn’t anything with science, it’s one of translation and geography – I say geography because Luke says they were in the Adriatic Sea when the shipwreck happened; there is no way anyone whose ship was in trouble in the Adriatic would end up at Malta, the main reason being that once they were in the Adriatic the currents would have tended to keep them in that sea, and Melita is the first island in a chain that the currents would have carried them to.