Something that became really clear during COVID is the sheer extent to which universities seem to lack basic research ethics. The ivermectin debate could be summed up as "once we exclude obviously fraudulent papers, what do we have left" which is why it was so rancorous. Disease prediction as a field is pure fraud: they cannot predict epidemics, never could, aren't on track to be able to, don't use the scientific method and yet routinely make predictions with absolute confidence whilst claiming to be scientists. Microbiology is flooded with papers that are quite obviously being manufactured by professional fraudsters, logical fallacies and false statements are easy to find across many fields, every other paper falls apart the moment you poke it yet nobody cares about any of this. Universities don't care, journals don't care, peers don't care, nobody within the academic system cares.
Why don't they care? Why don't universities actually fire professors who are found to have been writing BS papers? The only viable explanation is that the people at the top know full well that this behavior is at saturation levels and trying to clean it up would destroy their institutions. How could they know that? If they got to the top by doing it themselves, that would definitely be one explanation.