Fraud and fabrication of results are abhorrent, but this is too simplistic a take. These fraudulent results didn't single-handedly spawn 16 years of fruitless research. Instead blame the incentives that create a system where nobody validates a result for 16 years.

If academic science were in a healthy state, novel results would be validated 100s of times. The current system is setup such that only novel results are rewarded. There is no reward for validation. During my PhD I was actively discouraged from performing experiments/studies that weren't "new". Everything ultimately comes back to the funding model. Scientists are only funded for groundbreaking work, measured by the number of publications. In turn, journals will only accept previously unpublished work.