No, that's a quote from someone they interviewed who hasn't read the full paper (the full paper is not yet available). They are saying that the details of the study will determine how significant the results are.
> So correlation is likely just a data artifact of poor data analysis and nothing to do with intermittent fasting?
You have no idea whether the data analysis is good or not; the only thing that was released is the abstract.
> nobody in the 20th century imagined that within just two decades we'd be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later
That one graph from one epidemiological study is not enough to refute 60 years of data from many clinical trials. There is probably a confounding variable.
