[creer]

A fair point here is the impact of the crime. As the author puts it: "if it delayed a successful treatment by just 1 year, I estimate that it would have caused the loss of 36 million QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years), which is more than the QALYs lost by Americans in World War II."

Of course these are just the wildly successful instances of such fraud. Many such fraud probably represent just one more quickly ignore paper. But still, the crime matters because it has this potential to derail a field. The magnitude of the crime is not represented by calling it "fraud".