Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he may 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 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.
The three journals he named, all established in the 1800s, publish original, peer-reviewed research and play a central role in disseminating medical findings worldwide. JAMA, published by the American Medical Association, and the Lancet 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.
The journals did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Kennedy’s remarks.
Kennedy also accused several of the agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services – including 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 – of being “sock puppets” for the pharmaceutical industry.
On his plans for the department to create its own journals, Kennedy said they would “become the preeminent journals, because if you get [NIH] funding, it is anointing you as a good, legitimate scientist.”
Adam Gaffney, a public health researcher and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in an email that “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.”
He said that drug approvals are based on sound science, and that while steps should be taken to ensure that commercial interests don’t impact “the conduct or reporting of science,” 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.
The podcast episode was released soon after Kennedy bypassed the CDC and declared that his department would stop recommending the coronavirus vaccine for healthy pregnant women and children.
Last week, the administration released what it called a “MAHA report” that challenged mainstream medical consensus on issues such as vaccines. Medical experts said some of the report’s suggestions stretched the limits of science, The Washington Post reported, while several sections of the report offered misleading representations of findings in scientific papers.
Kennedy’s remarks and the report come amid growing concern in the scientific community over the Trump administration’s actions that have stalled or disrupted research efforts. In April, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia sent an unusual letter to the scientific journal Chest that questioned its editorial policies, sparking free-speech concerns.
NIH funding fell by more than $3 billion between President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration and March, compared with grants issued in the same period last year, and top universities have lost out on government funding for research.
At HHS, Kennedy has spearheaded a purge of about 20,000 federal workers, impacting virtually every arm of the department. The personnel cuts and funding freezes have prompted U.S. scientists to consider moving abroad as countries such as France, Germany, Spain and China have begun actively recruiting American researchers.
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