"Over the last several months, we have replicated the results of these papers. The authors supplied us with eight lines of code and answered a couple of questions about the covariates, which did not replicate the results. Most of our replication was done through first principles combined with trial and error. Once we were reasonably close to the results of the first national study on cancer mortality, we took the methodology and applied it to numerous other landmarks."

Author implies that Alwadi et al. was not forthcoming with sharing the data underlying their studies. Because otherwise they should be able to exactly replicate their results. "Reasonably close" does not cut it.