The question "Did you publish a paper with [famous scientist/researcher]" is not too different from the question "Did you go to dinner with [famous actress/entertainer/]" in other contexts. The give some clout, recognition, some minor envy from others.
Aren't those roles supposed to hold a significant amount of responsibility and therefore require a certain level of commitment? A day has only 24 hours. How much time do you think someone in such a position can dedicate to reviewing papers?
If you know that there is wide spread fraud in science, and you know how it's done, why not profit and publish a paper on it?
"John Ioannidis is one of the most published and influential scientists in the world, someone whose skewering of bad medical research we at SBM have frequently lauded over the years. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Since then, Prof. Ioannidis has been publishing dubious studies that minimize the dangers of the coronavirus, shown up in the media to decry “lockdowns,” and, most recently, “punched down”, attacking a graduate student for having criticized him. What happened? Did Prof. Ioannidis change, or was he always like this and I just didn’t see it? Either way, he’s a cautionary tale of how even science watchdogs can fall prey to hubris."
Great find.
So he was wrong? So what? To be a scientist means to blunder a lot. In fact, to be a scientist means to (be willing to) blunder much, much more than everybody else because that is the only way to learn. Science, ultimately, only gives you the tools to know when you're wrong.
One of the earlier researchers on psychopaths was Hervey M. Cleckley. In his book on the topic The Mask of Sanity one of his vignettes of, I believe, "incomplete manifestation of psychopathology" was of a psychologist who gave public lectures on psychopaths, without apparently recognizing that he was almost one of them.
To sum up the parallel, there are two kinds of people who tend to talk the most about any social or personal ill: those who are worried about the ill, and those who are distracting from the fact that they themselves embody it. (Technically this probably overlaps a bit, as ex-alcoholics are often worried about alcoholism, for example.)
If you would like to send me a link, or other reference, to the "peer reviewed article" in which "the commenting on personal appearance took place" please feel welcome to do so.
From what I can gather from the published journal article it appears that if these paragraphs of ad hominems were in it they did not survive the review process: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554
Unfortunately I don't know how to find the pre-publication submission.
I think this is what UncleMeat refers to as "insulting the physical appearance" of grad students who disagreed with him on twitter:
At that time, the name of the Twitter account owner was not obviously visible (the photo showed an unrecognizable figure with big glasses and a cat), but Meyerowitz-Katz seemed to use the Twitter account prolifically to promote his own work and criticize work contradicting his work. The identity of the Health Nerd Twitter account has become transparent now, since the owner has added a photo of him (wearing a T-shirt that writes “Trust me, I am an epidemiologist”).
In summary, what Ioannidis said was that the twitter account showed an image of someone with big glasses and a cat, and that the owner posted a photo of himself wearing a t-shirt with a slogan.
I would like to say that I struggle to find how that is insulting, but in truth I don't struggle at all. That's all happening on twitter where anything anyone says is insulting to someone. I mean, if he had said something along the lines of "what stupid glasses" or "what stupid t-shirt", yeah, that would have been insulting in the real world. But "an unrecognizable figure with big glasses and a cat)" is an insult- how? To whom? The unrecognisable figure? The cat?
So it's just as I said above, as expected. That whole thing was something inconsequential that social media made a huge todo about because it's social media and people are on it when they have nothing to do. I'm on it right now, I guess, and I actually do have things to do, so ttyl.
From the Supporting Information: [Correction added on 5 January 2022 after first online publication: Information including ad hominem comments directed by the author at people critiquing his work was removed by the author from the appendix in Supporting Information during copy editing between Accepted Article and Version of Record versions of this article. For more information about Wiley policy on changes to Accepted Articles please refer to https://authorservices.wiley.com/ethics-guidelines/index.htm...
No one did.
That said, despite the serious amount of professional scrutiny and and public harassment he was subject to, I think he made valuable contributions to the conversation around COVID-19 public policy.
I think I read the biggest part of the appendix in the linked article and it doesn't come across as what you say. It comes across as irrelevant and unnecessary. The passage was put in an appendix but it really belonged in a blog post, or a tweet, but certainly not in a scholarly article. But other than that, it wasn't even particularly vituperative, just indulgent, really.
It certainly wasn't "insult[ing]" as the parent claimed.
And then of course he removed it from the appendix with a note taking responsibility for it. Yet here we are, still talking about it, as if he stabbed someone in the face or ate babies alive, or anyway whatever a scientist's reputation can reasonably be expected to never recover from.
Doing this once a week seems very reasonable.