Here’s a rebuttal from a statistician at Columbia University: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...

Buzzfeed is a solid journalism source. Yes, they also are famous for stupid clickbait articles, but if you read the article you will find it's quite solid.

I already posted a second link for you, from the SJ Mercury News, which you chose to ignore. Perhaps you didn't see it. Here are some more:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/stanford-...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-co...

https://twitter.com/carlzimmer/status/1251176233594949632

These are all popular articles (and one tweetstorm) because that's what I have collected. If you spend just moments looking in scientific community discussions you will also find many, many critiques. But really it's that first Buzzfeed article you have to go back to because it establishes the motive for the badly conducted and analyzed study, a political agenda and a foregone conclusion. It's the worst form of scientific corruption.

For what it's worth, I saw him on a TV interview saying that COVID was less bad than the flu:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF4lKVFpREU

Curiously, Stanford excels at poor research methodology these days, with MIT a close second. It turns out that faculty positions are competitive enough at the elites that few make it in without cheating. There has been a steady decline in research integrity (with a parallel incline in research impact) as competition went up.

I'm not sure what to do about it. I know MIT better than Stanford, and fixing the culture would involve firing a big chunk of the faculty. You can't fire tenured faculty, even if you could get people to acknowledge the problem.

Integrity at 2nd and 3rd tier schools is still a lot higher, but we do need to fix incentive structures, or the rot will take over academia.

Softer disciplines (like social sciences) are way ahead of harder disciplines like CS on the rot curve. In CS, it's a lot harder to bake data.