Why? Some guy writing an op-ed saying how frustrating it is that science is full of fraud is a great argument for the scientific method? There have been people writing articles like this for over 20 years if not much longer about all kinds of fields. Nothing ever happens, nothing ever improves, it never goes beyond people saying "tut tut how terrible". This sort of thing is entirely predictable and will keep happening, over and over again. On the current course, there will be articles just like this one being discussed in another twenty years from now.
I don't think Derek Lowe is frustrated that "science is full of fraud", this is likely editorialization on your part. It seems that it stems specifically from Masliah, who is common across all papers in the dossier. Granted, Masliah appears to be prolific, so this is admittedly a large issue in the peer review and verification structure in this field.
To put this into context though:
Let's begin by supposing that fraud exists in all ventures where people stand to gain, which I don't think is controversial at all, especially not in this comment section.
In light of this assumption the fact that this all came out in the first place is proof that being a luminary does not make you immune from investigation. That this happens 'over and over again' simply means that eventually we catching this fraud. The fact that the scientific community is constantly trying to reproduce and verify is why these become public in the first place.
So on the contrary, it's not that nothing ever happens or nothing ever improves. There will be articles like this one in twenty years because there will still be fraudsters in twenty years, and there will still be scientists working to verify their work.
I don't think it's true that eventually we are catching this fraud :( This keeps happening because so much is out there, it doesn't follow that all or even most of it is being caught. Even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent being caught would yield a constant stream of such stories. I have a collection of articles on my blog dating back years that cover various fraudulent papers in different fields, and even whole fields in which the bulk of all papers are based on fraud (e.g. the literature dealing with misinformation bots on Twitter). None of them have ever been retracted or even had any of the problems be acknowledged outside of the blogosphere.
It's really hard to understand the scale of the problem until you wade through it yourself. Fraud is absolutely endemic in science. Dig in and you can easily uncover bogus papers, and none of them will ever be acknowledged or retracted. In particular there's a nasty attitude problem in which reports of fraud from outside the academic institutions will frequently be written off as "right wing" and thus inherently illegitimate. This can happen regardless of the nature of the criticism or whether it's in any way political. Literally, things like bug reports or reports of numbers that don't add up can be discarded this way. Thus they implement an unwritten rule that only academics are allowed to report fraud by academics, and of course, they are strongly incentivized not to do so. So Lowe is correct. It's really a mess.
Took a quick look at your blog. Some of those examples are quite bad, similar to the fake gels in the Science article. Do you know if any of them gained particular attention?
There was a paper written by a couple of Germans on the Botometer stuff. The first version of the paper cited me, they spent a year or two trying to get a version published and it was eventually cut down and got into obscure social science journal and ignored. Nothing ever came of it really.
The stuff on PCR test false positives went somewhat viral and got some attention from outside of academia but of course it was during COVID so it was ignored by the institutions.
The stuff on epidemiology and the history of Neil Ferguson was triggered originally by an article in the Telegraph. It went no further than that.
The fake lesion surgery got noticed on Twitter and I think it was eventually retracted but the perps still work for the NHS.
The paper mills and fake biology papers gets published about occasionally in mainstream press. But nothing happens.
