The rejection reason: "it is appropriate to hold claims around the herd immunity threshold to a very high evidence bar, as these would be interpreted to justify relaxation of interventions, potentially placing people at risk."
What should scientific institutions do? Answer questions about the natural world honestly.
What should politicians do? Make policy tradeoffs informed by those answers and the preferences of the public.
What were the institutions actually doing? Hiding correct answers due to an ideological and pathologically strong preference for risk avoidance without any regard for cost.
> they’d happily publish papers suggesting lower levels of herd immunity, but the papers would require more rigour than that which was provided.
A "very high evidence bar" that isn't described anywhere is one that doesn't actually exist. They never showed anything wrong with the science, they rejected it out of hand because they didn't like that it would support a libertarian conclusion. Even if they had invented such a bar, requiring weak evidence for policies you like and strong evidence for policies you dislike is exactly the kind of pseudo-scientific intellectual fraud being criticized in the article.
COVID was full of this stuff. That event wasn't surprising, it was typical behavior of most "scientists".
You have to realize, that when the universities get disestablished, it'll be because of decades of discussions like this one. The correct response to that Twitter thread is to demand the journal be immediately shut down and that heads roll at the publisher. The wrong response is to say "of course we should block research that supports policies we dislike, why would anyone be against that?"