Editorial: Kennedy to NIH Staff: Don’t Publish. The Rest of Us Can Perish
RFK Jr’s plans to bar federal scientists from publishing in established journals are just plain dumb.
There are very few absolutes in medicine, but there are a few absolute truths.
The most important is that medical wisdom is built on observation, investigation, and yes, even trial and error (that’s why they’re called clinical trials). All that we accept as true is based on consensus, via the accumulation of knowledge that leads inexorably to the conclusion, for example, that a single typo among an estimated 3 billion DNA letter pairs can cause a devastating neuromuscular disease; or the conviction that drug X is better than drug Y at treating cancer, heart disease, or diabetes, or any other of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
The evidence that supports these conclusions is disputed, refuted, or accepted, and then disseminated, through the medium of medical publishing in print and online, in both general purpose journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), The Lancet, Nature, and Science, and in specialty publications such as Cell, Cancer Discovery, Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology, and hundreds of others.
So even in these parlous times, when I was beginning to think that I had become numb to the usurpations and depredations of the rabidly anti-science Trump administration, I was particularly dismayed to hear that US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is floating the idea of banning government scientists from publishing their findings in the world’s leading medical journals. Not to worry though, because Kennedy Jr. proposes creating government-run “in-house” journals that will presumably publish medical “science,” as filtered through the worm-eaten brain of the current HHS Secretary.
And as this editorial was going to press, news broke that Kennedy had summarily fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, ostensibly because of conflicts of interest, but in reality—as he admitted in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal—because many of the members had been appointed by Joe Biden.
“Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics, but there is one thing all parties can agree on: The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust. Whether toward health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or vaccines themselves, public confidence is waning,” wrote the man who has done more damage to the reputation of vaccines than anyone else on the planet.
Evidence, schmevidence
Let’s consider all of this for a moment. Kennedy Jr. is an environmental lawyer by profession, not a physician, researcher, or scientist. He is an anti-vaccine zealot (despite his protests to the contrary), blaming vaccines for causing autism despite reams of evidence to refute the notion, and then filing lucrative lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
He is a conspiracy theorist who said that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” You can see it here, courtesy of the New York Post.
In 2023, RFK Jr. told a writer for New York magazine “There are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS,” adding that Anthony Fauci and other pioneering AIDS researchers “were doing phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people.”
That’s a pretty laughable assertion, when millions of people who are infected with HIV, but take drugs to suppress it, don’t develop AIDS.
In his 2021 book Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Children’s Health Defense), Kennedy describes Fauci as “the powerful technocrat who helped orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’etat against Western democracy.”
And let’s savor this nugget from Forbes magazine, not known for left-leaning politics:
“Kennedy Jr. has promoted the disproven conspiracy that 5G cellular networks—an advanced wireless technology standard for mobile phones—allow governments to collect user data and ‘control’ their behavior, CBS reported in 2023. He also told Joe Rogan in a June podcast interview that WiFi ‘radiation’ causes cancer, ‘cellphone tumors’ and ‘opens your blood brain barrier’ to toxins.”
As Forrest Gump said “Stupid is as stupid does,” but in RFK Jr.’s case, it’s both his actions and his words that are tinfoil-hat crazy.
Why should we care?
As former JAMA Editor-in-Chief George D. Lundberg, MD, points out in a commentary in the medical news site Medscape: “This move risks backfiring on two major fronts. First, it will only accelerate private industry’s sway over the scientific record. Second, launching new, government-run journals will demand vast resources and years of effort—and still won’t earn the credibility of established publications.”
New England Journal of Medicine editor-in-chief Eric J. Rubin, MD, PhD, told the Boston public radio station GBH that Kennedy’s proposal “is a danger to medical journals,” adding: “I really want to put it in the context of medical research in general. Certainly, what hurts a journal is not only attacking its reputation directly, but cutting off the important research that we publish. So, I think this is all part and parcel of a threat to the scientific enterprise in general.”
Sure, even the most prestigious medical journals occasionally publish stories of questionable worth, as in the case of Andrew Wakefield, a now-discredited physician whose study published in The Lancet claimed a link between the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine and autism.
The Wakefield paper was retracted by The Lancet in 2010, with the notice that “[f]ollowing the judgment of the UK General Medical Council's Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation.” Wakefield’s medical license was subsequently revoked.
That didn’t stop Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers from citing the paper as “proof” that vaccines can cause harm. Indeed, that paper did irreparable damage to public trust in vaccines, which, it bears repeating, have saved countless millions of lives. Ask yourself, do you know anyone who has died from, or been terribly scarred or disabled by, smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid, polio? If not, why do you think that is?
But the fact that the paper was eventually retracted shows that the peer-review process that scientific journals rely on actually works. If RFK minor goes ahead with his foolish plans, clinical research performed by US Government employees will lose credibility, and we will all be the worse for it.
Neil Osterweil is an award-winning medical journalist with more than 40 years of experience reporting on medicine and health care.