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The nation’s top public health official may prevent federally funded scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and launch in-house journals instead.
“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,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said on the Ultimate Human podcast, The Washington Post and other outlets reported Tuesday.
Kennedy, who denies that vaccines are safe and effective, suggested without evidence that those journals—as well as federal agencies such as 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—are under the control of pharmaceutical companies.
Publishing papers in the top-tier peer-reviewed journals is an aspiration of many scientists who want to advance in their careers and earn tenure. But Kennedy believes that new journals the government may launch will take their place as “pre-eminent journals, because if you get [NIH] funding, it is anointing you as a good, legitimate scientist.”
But since President Donald Trump took office in January, the prestige of NIH funding has already lost its luster for the scores of scientists whose life’s work has been caught in the cross fire of the ideologically driven changes reshaping the agency.
Kennedy’s comments come amid major changes at the HHS, which has fired 20,000 federal workers. In addition, the NIH—which is the largest funder of medical research at universities—has terminated hundreds of grants over the past few months on the grounds that the projects, including many related to vaccine hesitancy and LGBTQ+ health, no longer effectuate agency priorities.
