Just to take you more seriously than other commenters An ad hominem is an attack against the person and not the argument, and, well, you got a point there. I t

Just to take you more seriously than other commenters An ad hominem is an attack against the person and not the argument, and, well, you got a point there. I think what would make it a fallacious argument is if the attack against the person was irrelevant - pretend instead they shared incidents of inexcusable rudeness, which would be bad but irrelevant to the published findings. Instead it is highly relevant. Conflicts of interest undermine trust because they pervert outcomes. This is a situation where trust is very important, hence pointing out conflicts of interest to the person is relevant to the research. Poisoning the well refers to pre-emptively discrediting a persons argument. Which, yeah, I could see that. Again though the information is relevant and in this case means that you should closely scrutinize their findings before use, as opposed to accepting them at face value due to a damaged trust. I don’t think it makes sense to apply definitions from formal debate broadly to other contexts. If you had made the argument yourself that you implied by invoking those names you would have seen why they didn’t apply. It allows for extremely lazy rhetoric where you disregard any statement that makes some one look bad as an ad hominem. In a debate it makes sense to separate arguer from argument - in most other contexts it does not. You don’t separate the plumber from their previous plumbing, and you shouldn’t separate the report, the science, the scientists, the fucking statistics from the funding.