The criticism was mainly on the wrong model and wrong data, not the code quality.
A good model must be robust and verifiable, this is neither robust nor verifiable. Just compare it to a good model, like the Göttingen model with Bayes inference, which successfully predicted results two weeks into the future. Multiple times. <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/14/science.abb9789.full" rel="nofollow">https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/05/14/scie...</a><p>Ferguson's model was always exponentially wrong, you can even say catastrophically wrong given the economic costs.<p>Nature still defending this catatrophy, interesting. So they also switched to non- science, supporting politics. The political angle is that they want to suppress extreme right-wing shifts as after the last such political/economical crisis 1930, caused by fatefully wrong political decisions. As they happened after and because of the Ferguson study.