I look at this from a legal perspective. If you want to prosecute someone for a crime, you need to be able to prove every element beyond a reasonable doubt. One of those elements is the mens rea or intent. That might require that you intentionally, knowingly, negligently, or purposefully did something. Proving someone's mental state is difficult but sometimes their actions give them away.
An example is a drug courier. If you were driving to a restaurant with a friend and they stopped across the street from a UPS store and asked if you could run in and pick up a package for them because they were in a No Parking zone, you probably wouldn't think anything of it. However, if someone you barely knew offered you $50 if you would drive with them to a UPS store and you would go in and get a package and then return to the car, you would think that there was probably something illegal in that package for them to offer you a bunch of money for something they could easily do themselves for free.
In our case, the clinicaltrials.gov website, which is believed to be updateable by the company, states that the primary endpoint of the trial is PFS. If the company is claiming the endpoint is changed, then why haven't they changed it in the 19 months since the trial ended because you can't change it after data-lock? So it is reasonable for shorts to claim that the endpoints have not changed. Likewise, the fact that cross-over patients seem to do better than DC Vax-L patients requires some additional explanation. Hence why they need to have a journal article.
So yeah, maybe if they had done everything right, this all still would have fallen apart but then there would have been actual evidence of malicious intent and bad faith. Instead we are in a squishy grey area that no one is likely to touch. When the Washington Post piece came out several years back, other news organizations came to AF's defense. Without actual evidence of a crime, suggesting a journalist committed a crime is not a good move.
