Good point about the reproducibility crisis. We seem to have forgotten about that.
There is a better alternative to listening to random people I think which is to follow the work of individual scientists whom we trust because we have been following their work over a long period of time and because they exhibit Jacob Bronowski's 'habit of truth'.
Unfortunately, I don't know any immunologists or epidemiologists! I'm guessing that censorship on balance makes it harder rather than easier to find them.
As much as scientists are taking a hard look at their own processes it is important to still lean on what is as close to known as can be.
You don't need to blindly trust science but also don't be blind to it. Assuming everything is false just leads to guts dominating which is unhelpful.
Similarly if there isn't studies done then relying on the ideas put forth by those who are in the field is better than arbitrary people looking for their five minutes of fame.
The peer review problem is "maybe we need to find a way to find good papers in addition to blocking bad ones" and the reproducibility problem is "people tend to focus so much on novel results that we end up effectively p hacking across all the studies we do".
Neither of those is the way it is usually referred to in layman's terms as "science is broken" that is an exaggeration but hey we do live in a world where that is how people talk...
Except you are missing a huge huge part of what you linked:
> We conclude that the reviewing process for the 2014 conference was good for identifying poor papers
When it comes to peer review that is the actual goal. Have a filter that prevents bad things from getting published.
In an ideal world we would have a process that allows good papers to be published as well.
However I think we can all agree that is a secondary concern. Especially since pre-publish announcements are common anyway, so it isn't like no one is looking at papers that aren't published.
There’s plenty of bad/fraudulent/wrong stuff that gets through peer review, perhaps even a majority.