Allegating that the articles are “all corrupt,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatened to forbid National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists from publishing in three prestigious medical journals Tuesday.
During an appearance on the “Ultimate Human” podcast, RFK Jr. contended 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 minimize corporate profits.”
The HHS official informed podcast presenter Gary Brecka, “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 Jr. later asserted that “even the heads of those journals” feel their publications are “vessel[s] for pharmaceutical propaganda,” not “novel science journals.”
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.
