[eigenket]

They didn't blindly accept it. They originally rejected it, and eventually published it in a special issue called "science wars", the purpose of which was to have as many different points of view as possible. This special issue was not peer-reviewed at all, so saying they decided not to reach out to a physicist because he was a big name is inaccurate, they didn't peer review anyone.

I think this comment also slightly misinterprets the purpose of peer review. Peer review (despite being a rather broken system) is pretty good at finding honest mistakes. It can sometimes discover fraudulent stuff when the people committing the fraud are particularly bad at it, but peer review isn't supposed to be the sole line of defence against fraudulent behaviour.

I'm not an experimentalist but if someone claims to have done some experiments in a paper and reports some results, it isn't realistic for peer reviewers to repeat those experiments themselves and see if the results are genuine. That happens later after the paper is published and other people try to build on the work.

The system is "working as intended" if fraudulent papers get published occasionally, but are later discovered and retracted.