lisa_labSD said:

It is worth asking what the claim would look like if it were false.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. It helps to ask what evidence would change your mind before you look at any. If nothing would, the discussion is not about evidence, and it is better to say so early than to spend nine posts discovering it.

The figures, for anyone assembling their own picture. Keep the original post as written when you update it, and add the correction underneath. An edited-away mistake is invisible to the next person who makes it.

A narrower follow-up, since the general answer is now clear:

What a vetting checklist should actually contain, as opposed to a list of things that are easy to fake?

BethLabQueen said:

Keep the original post as written when you update it, and add the correction underneath.

Careful with the causal language. Two things moving together in a period when five things changed is not a mechanism, and stating it as one makes the thread less useful to somebody reading it later.

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

Reporting back with a partial result, because a partial result is still better than silence. Two of the three things suggested helped; I cannot separate them and I am not going to pretend otherwise.