Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatened to bar National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists from publishing in three top medical journals Tuesday, alleging that the publications are “all corrupt.”
RFK Jr. argued the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and The Lancet all have ties to the pharmaceutical industry that influence research findings and prevent the publication of “anything where the results may diminish corporate profits,” during an appearance on the “Ultimate Human” podcast.
“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,” the HHS chief told podcast host Gary Brecka.
Kennedy Jr. went on to claim that “even the heads of those journals” believe their publications are “no longer science journals” but instead “vessel[s] for pharmaceutical propaganda.”
The HHS secretary appeared to be referring to a 2015 commentary piece published by The Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton, in which he argued that the “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue” partly because of “flagrant conflicts of interest” and research findings that cannot be replicated; and a 2009 New York Review article by former NEJM editor-in-chief Marcia Angell, where she wrote that it “is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published” due to involvement by the pharmaceutical industry.
“Unless these journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing there and we are going to create our own journals, in-house, in each of the institutes … and they are going to become the preeminent journals,” RFK Jr. said. “Because if you get NIH funding, it is anointing you as a good, legitimate scientist.”
The New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
Last week, the White House released its Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission report, spearheaded by RFK Jr., which accused the pharmaceutical industry of “distorting scientific literature” via “corporate capture.”
“Drug companies,” the report claims, “exercise corporate control over the research agenda, corporate control of the research findings seen by patients and doctors, and corporate influence over the review of those findings.”
“Despite the broad inability of scientists or journalists to obtain access to original research data from pharmaceutical companies, there is an overwhelming body of scientific evidence supporting the conclusion that pharmaceutical industry dominance of research leads to distorted and misleading information routinely published in top journals, while journals and their content are routinely manipulated and controlled by industry money,” it states.
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