Reasoned questioning of science happens during peer review; it’s built into the process of accepting new science.
Peer review is broken beyond repair. The majority of peer review studies have non reproducible results, less so in math and physics, and more in social studies. Abusing the system (especially in non top tier) is pretty easy, and even without malicious actors, the system is pretty bad.
As anecdotal evidence in my field (AI/Computer Vision):
- one of the most cited papers (over 125k citations) has an error in the proof of convergence.
- another massively cited paper (over 40k citations) is wrong in the explanation why stuff in that paper works.
For what is worth:
- last year I was outstanding reviewer in both of the main venues in computer vision (there were probably less than 20 people who got the award in both), and I didn’t spend more than 2 hours in any of the paper I reviewed. Most of reviewers are worse than me and spend less time than that. You can imagine that in very technical papers, this means extremely superficial reviewing.
And computer science is light years ahead of social sciences in this. In social sciences, abusing statistics is pretty easy to come with whatever conclusions you want. In fact, you can get papers by just playing to the current social trends. There was this group of researchers who managed to get 8 batshit crazy papers by just playing to the trends. For example, during the middle of me2 campaign they got a paper accepted that arguments that ‘masturbating with the photo of someone without their permission is rape’.
Of course this does not mean that the entire system doesn’t work at all, but a dose of skepticism is needed. Saying that, what he is saying is probably some agenda against Fauci / right-wing conspiracy which has been going for some time, and likely gonna get intensified in the future. However the main point is correct, but the messenger is the wrong one.