As someone working in the field of earthquake engineering this is very scary for me. Earthquakes are caused due to buildup of stress between two giant pieces of rocks trying to slide past each other. A swarm of small earthquakes can sometime release the stress thus lowering the probability of a big earthquake, so the scientists were not entirely wrong in their statements.

Also earthquake predictions are discouraged since false positives can have huge adverse economic impact (people and businesses fleeing the region) the best way to prepare for an earthquake for a community is to build good safe earthquake resistant houses rather than blaming scientists for not predicting some inherently random phenomenon.