Most research is somewhere between: scientist has a belief on how something works and does studies that can provide evidence for or against it and competing hypotheses. Doesn’t matter if it’s super basic science about some obscure bacterial protein that has no known real world implications: often the scientists have a belief before doing the studies. There nothing wrong with that as long as you don’t hide data and you are open to being wrong. Aelwero provided no evidence for their claim. If we just accept that “well maybe there lying”, we would have to reject all science by that standard.

Of course independent groups should verify results from other studies. But it’s boring, non-flashy work that makes enemies and doesn’t interest funders. But we should work towards getting more funding to do this. We also should work towards a culture of reporting null data. Not reporting “no difference between groups” can result in a similar problem without anyone intentionally doing it (sorta like the jelly bean xkcd, but with 20 different groups doing the same experiment but only 1 publishes because they didn’t know 19 group already tried and found no association and only they did by chance).