The legitimacy of prestigious medical and scientific journals is under siege as the Trump administration threatens to take federal research elsewhere and scrutiny falls on their alleged coziness with regulators, interest groups and drugmakers, with perhaps the most serious consequences in the integrity of COVID-19 origin research.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called out the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet as “corrupt,” on The Ultimate Human podcast Tuesday.
The National Institutes of Health will “probably” stop publishing its scientists’ research there, and each institute will set up its own journal “unless these journals change dramatically,” he said.
One obvious target for publishing is the new Journal of the Academy of Public Health, established in part by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary shortly before they were tapped for the new administration.
HHS also plans to devote “probably 20% of NIH’s budget to replication” to address the longstanding irreproducibility crisis, he said. “Every study has to be replicated.”
Asked which medical journals weren’t on Kennedy’s blacklist, an HHS spokesperson told Just the News its “top priority is to ensure scientific research remains rigorous, transparent, and accessible to the American people. The secretary urges leading medical journals to increase transparency and reduce editorial bias.”
It’s just one of many big changes in the federal public health agencies, with Kennedy and his Argentine counterpart announcing they are creating an “alternative international health system” to the World Health Organization in the wake of WHO’s first-ever pandemic treaty.
HHS also pared back COVID vaccine recommendations and cut Moderna’s $700 million bird flu vaccine contract.
Kennedy alleged the pharmaceutical industry and “medical cartel” have captured and transformed NIH, FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid into “essentially sock puppets for the industry and profit centers” that “commoditized the American public and turned us all into patients.”
Hellbound and Down 