"There are ton of garbage science around. That makes me even less confident about things that are not even science."

Your argument, or world view, is that you can determine what's true by looking at who scientists trust and the peer reviews of these scientists. I've just named a man who is by universal academic consensus a scientist, but who - as you're aware - produces garbage science without any pushback. In fact, as far as epidemiology is concerned, ICL are the bees knees. One of their worst most obviously garbage papers has over 1300 citations!

And so your answer is that scientists don't spend time rebutting it (and never have) because it's so obviously bad they don't need to? Why do they keep citing it then? Where are the initial takedowns that established so strongly this guy was a fraud that scientists don't feel a need to write any more, and why do no governments seem to be aware of this?

Put another way, how can you determine which scientists are doing good work vs bad if all the available evidence, like citation counts, suggests they don't care and confuse bad work for good all the time? Remember that scientists are always "selling", which is why they complain about the grant application process so much. They are selling interesting claims to governments, not exactly known for being discerning buyers.

"It took even more years of solid journalistic investigation to show how much of a fraud he was."

Yes, it was hard work. Do you think current mainstream journalism is solid? I don't. The average science journalist would apparently rather die than argue with a scientist about anything, let alone allege fraud. They see their job as amplifying 'expert' voices, not investigating them.

But such journalism does exist and can be found outside of the large media institutions. You just have to look for it. Here's a small selection:

https://dailysceptic.org/ - news and analysis from the UK, they often do reviews of scientific papers and find flaws in them. For example this review of a paper by Ferguson's group:

https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-pap...

All the content on this site is free and there are no ads. Mostly donation driven with lots of user submitted articles. Many readers and guest article writers have an academic, scientific, engineering or data analysis background.

https://eugyppius.substack.com/ - a mix of data analysis, fact checks and political analysis. Some paywalled content but not much.

https://bartram.substack.com/ - very deep analysis of the UK data (which is the best quality in the world) by a pseudonymous "former academic and senior UK government scientist".

https://alexberenson.substack.com/ - a former NYT investigative reporter who did a science beat in the past. He has a more US-centric approach, and mixes data analysis with links to other news stories and various journalistic hot takes. He's a regular writer rather than someone with a data background, but he still does a decent enough job and the comments section usually picks up pretty fast when there's a risk of statistical mis-analysis.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/ - a weird one but has some good articles: lots of data analysis mixed with populist "rise up" style political exhortions and amusing cat pictures. Very different to anything you'll find in a newspaper but there's still lots of thought provoking data here.

https://greenwald.substack.com/ - this is mostly analysis of media coverage rather than scientific papers e.g. https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/the-nyts-partisan-tale-... but it can be useful for fact checking. This is one where some content is paywalled.

So now you'll go through and find reasons why you don't like these sources, or don't find them credible enough. Fine, but I don't find outlets like the BBC or NYT or Nature credible because there were too many times they published things that were clearly untrue and agenda-driven, then ignored all feedback about it.