Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr has turned his attention away from discouraging vaccines to violating the First Amendment rights when he noted “they’ may ban government scientists from contributing to medical journals. Instead he is pondering creating some “in house” publications put out by his agency.
During an “ultimate Human” podcast appearance, Kennedy said, “we’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they’re all corrupt” and “under the control of pharmaceutical companies.”
The journals Kennedy listed by name are all peer-reviewed research journals that were established well over 100 years ago – in the 1800’s. The American Medical Association journal “JAMA” and the “Lancet” have some 30 million visits to their websites each year; while the “New England Journal if Medicine” sees over million visitors each week!
Kennedy didn’t stop there, he expressed accusations that the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were “sock puppets for the pharmaceutical industry”.
The current administration has spent a great deal of time since taking office slashing budgets, cancelling contracts, and revoking funding of agencies across the board including organizations like the National Institute for Health; however Kennedy contends that by the government creating journals of its own they would “become the preeminent journals, because if you get [NIH] funding, it is anointing you as a good, legitimate scientist.”
Harvard Medical School assistant professor Adam Gaffney said “banning NIH-funded researchers from publishing in leading medical journals and requiring them to publish only in journals that carry the RFK Jr. seal of approval would delegitimize taxpayer-funded research.”
Gaffney also noted that drug approvals are based on “sound science” and “commercial interests don’t impact the conduct or reporting of science”. Adding “this was unlikely to happen given the Trump administration’s cuts to public health and research funding, as well as Kennedy’s own anti-vaccine views.
Since January 20 and the inauguration of the current administration, Kennedy has been vociferous in his attitude against the use of vaccines – most recently banning the coronavirus vaccine for healthy children and pregnant women, stripped NIH funding that stalled and even disrupted research, and purged some 20,000 workers. The results being that France, Germany, Spain and China are all actively recruiting American scientists that could result in a major “brain drain” of American academia.
The recent “MAHA” – Make America Healthy Again – challenges mainstream medical consensus on a number of issues. Medical experts alleged the report “stretched the limits of science” and “offered misleading representations of findings in scientific papers.”