RFK Jr. Considers Banning Government Scientists from Publishing in Established Journals
During an appearance on a podcast on Tuesday, May 27, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated that he might ban government scientists from the National Institutes of Health and other HHS agencies from publishing articles in nationally and internationally recognized clinical journals, and might create a government-sponsored journal for them to publish in.
The Washington Post’s Niha Masih and Amy B. Wang reported on Wednesday morning, May 28, that “Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he could bar government scientists from publishing in the world’s leading medical journals, instead proposing the creation of ‘in-house’ publications by his agency — the latest in the Trump administration’s attacks on scientific institutions. ‘We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA [published by the American Medical Association] and those other journals, because they’re all corrupt,’ Kennedy said during an appearance on the “Ultimate Human” podcast. He also described the journals as being under the control of pharmaceutical companies.”
As Masih and Wang wrote, “The three publications he named — which were established in the 1800s, and publish original, peer-reviewed research — play a central role in disseminating medical research worldwide. The Lancet and JAMA each say they receive more than 30 million annual visits to their sites, while the New England Journal of Medicine says it is read in print and online by more than 1 million people each week.”
“Unless those journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing in them and we’re going to create our own journals in-house,” he said, referring to the National Institutes of Health, an HHS agency that is the world’s largest funder of health research.
Per those comments, POLITICO’s Chelsea Cirruzzo wrote on Tuesday afternoon that “His comments come days after the White House released a major report, spearheaded by Kennedy, that says overprescribed medications could be driving a rise in chronic disease in children. The report suggests that influence from the pharmaceutical industry and a culture of fear around speaking out has drawn doctors and scientists away from studying the causes of chronic disease. It also comes after both JAMA and the NEJM received letters from the Department of Justice probing them for partisanship. Kennedy’s stance, however, conflicts with that of his NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, who recently told a reporter with POLITICO sister publication WELT he supports academic freedom, which “means I can send my paper out even if my bosses disagree with me.”
On the podcast, Kennedy claimed the heads of the leading journals, including The Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton and the former editor-in-chief of the NEJM, Marcia Angell, also no longer consider their publications reputable.
For further context, The New Republic’s Hafiz Rashid wrote on May 27 that, “Last week, the HHS released a report saying that overprescribed medications were the source of increased chronic diseases in children, blaming the pharmaceutical industry and a culture of fear for preventing doctors and scientists from studying these diseases’ root causes. And earlier this month, the Justice Department sent threatening letters to medical journals around the country, accusing them of partisanship. ‘It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications … are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,’ wrote Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia at the time, in a letter to the medical journal CHEST. According to NPR, the letters did not cite any evidence to back up Martin’s claims. The head of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, said in an interview earlier this month that he supports academic freedom, meaning that ‘I can send my paper out even if my bosses disagree with me.’”
Rashid went on to write that, “On the surface, that would seem to run counter to Kennedy’s proposed ban, but Bhattacharya and Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary, who are both also vaccine skeptics, just happen to have launched their own medical journal, Journal of the Academy of Public Health. The two are listed as ‘on leave’ from the journal, which has raised concerns about promoting misinformation. ‘It looks like a well-put-together journal, it’s been nicely designed and so forth,’ Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, told the journal Science. “But when you look at the papers that have been published and at the editorial board, you see that it’s really dominated [by] a small clique of contrarians around the COVID pandemic. There is certainly nothing like even representation of consensus viewpoints within infectious disease epidemiology.”
Rashid went on to note that, “For all of their talk about academic freedom and corruption, Kennedy, Bhattcharya, and Makary seem to be pushing their own views and stifling others’. Their appointments also coincide with mass layoffs and staff purges at their respective agencies, leaving behind smaller staffs less likely to raise objections out of fear of losing their jobs.”
