RFK, Jr. attacks "corrupt journals" with a corrupt idea of his own

HHS secretary RFK, Jr. went on a podcast this week - a curious platform for making health policy announcements - and predicted that government scientists would probably be banned from publishing in reputable medical journals. He named as corrupt The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, but tacked on “and those other journals.” What other journals? The BMJ? Cell? Nature? Just how big is his target?

He said that those three journals - and countless unnamed others? - were corrupt because they accepted drug company ads. I have criticized this advertising practice myself. But I’ve never called one of these three journals “corrupt.” One should expect the HHS secretary to provide clear, specific, unquestionable evidence of corruption before making this sweeping charge.

As the Washington Post reported:

“Kennedy also accused several 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.”

As if this weren’t enough, Kennedy then used the podcast to propose that he would create “in-house” journals published by his agency. He said they would “become the preeminent journals, because if you get [NIH] funding, it is anointing you as a good, legitimate scientist.” Oh, do you mean the “sock puppets”? Or does this mean you’re going to clean out the sock drawer completely - something you’ve already started, leaving a trail of disruption, confusion, and lack of direction.

Kennedy’s comments are laden with absurdity, inconsistency, and hypocrisy.

Corruption?

It takes a new level of audacity for Kennedy - whose own filings show millions of dollars he earned from anti-drug company litigation - to level charges of corruption without providing the evidence. He works in an administration that has allowed Elon Musk to gain access to Americans’ private information and to benefit from the President’s promotion and protection of Musk’s Tesla car brand. The Trump family itself, according to the New York Times, has “done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House.”

You wanna talk corruption? Time for some self-reflection.

An “in-house” journal idea that smells like an outhouse

A journalist wrote to me:

Will there be peer review, an editorial board, and all the components that go into publishing a reputable journal? Or will RFK, Jr. just decide on his own what gets accepted for publication, just as he did with vaccines by circumventing the experts at the CDC? Once again, H.L. Mencken was right, about 90 years ago: [Today] “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

“Government scientists”?

When Kennedy talks about government scientists, it doesn’t sit well with me. Scientists who work for or at the NIH, the FDA, the CDC, etc. were trained in the scientific method. They are driven by a pursuit of evidence. They are not politicians. The in-house journal plan reeks of political takeover of science - something that has already begun in the first 6 months of this administration.

It is ironic that some of the current Trump federal health agency appointees attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, a decades-long public servant in the NIH. He was what they would call a “government scientist” - the kind of person once “anointed as a good, legitimate scientist” - the term Kennedy used in the comments above to describe people who got NIH funding, much less ran an agency for decades, as Fauci did.

Anyone is free to speculate about what this might really mean, and about what could happen, because Kennedy took the highly questionable approach of announcing his “plan” on a podcast. It may be another case of Kennedy making bold predictions that later are quietly talked back. But this is serious. Today’s “government scientists” are sometimes blindsided by Kennedy, as were CDC officials when he announced changes to COVID vaccine recommendations without telling them. The Washington Post reported:

In his video, Kennedy…also said he was ending coronavirus shots for healthy pregnant women. But last week, top officials from the Food and Drug Administration outlined a new coronavirus vaccine policy in a New England Journal of Medicine article, approving shots only for those 65 and older and people with medical conditions that put them at high risk for severe illness. Pregnancy is listed as one of the conditions.

Let me get that straight: just last week FDA officials published a policy in one of the “corrupt” journals - a longtime common practice for FDA and other federal health agencies. And that policy was over-ruled by the head of HHS unilaterally without notification?

This is absurdity, inconsistency and hypocrisy wrapped up in one stunning example.

It is clear there will be more of the same. The brain worm may still be active in this guy’s brain and it may be infiltrating much of federal health policy.

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