> From an academic perspective it is worth exactly as much as a blog.
From the perspective of peer review, yes. But per google scholar that paper has been 66 cited times, including in many articles that are in at least somewhat reputable journals (published via Elsevier, ieee, Springer, etc) and apparently two books [0]. So I think it's pretty clear that being a "scientific paper from Princeton" was significant reputation wise regardless of whether or not it was peer reviewed.
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Epidemiological%20model...
I was also skeptical about the citations so I checked that two with freely available pdfs were actually this paper, they were
[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4ebb/b654c59aff454ad97301e6...