That's because it's exhausting to debunk idiots & those operating in bad faith (often both); it takes several orders of magnitude more work to respond and debunk that unicorns don't exist than it does to post that they do.
edit: "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills." t. redditadmin.txt
But that didn't stop the author from taking a bunch of out of context quotes to make an argument that sounded vaguely scientific - scientific enough for people with a particular agenda to parade it around as if the science was on their side.
I started writing a rebuttal to this article, but as I was carefully reading through the details of the nth study to see if it actually matched what the author claimed, I realized I was just massively wasting my own time. The people spreading the article around don't actually care, they never read those studies and they never will. They just wanted something scientific-looking to cite that backs up their pre-existing opinions.
This should give you a very hard pause and rethink. If it becomes impossible to refute unethical people because they have sources to back them up how do you know that anyone who has ever used scientific evidence in any shape or form was doing it ethically? Maybe they were just very good at citing sources?
Secondly, most ethics (except perhaps honesty) is fundamentally consensus driven. Science is supposed to be orthogonal to consensus. Thus, if one wants to be an honest scientist, one must accept possibility that one's work might be used for unethical ends. And honesty, to remind you, is an ethical position.
I find it hard to believe you're an epidemiologist trying to stay anonymous here.