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.
On his plans for the department to create its own journals, Kennedy said they would “become the preeminent journals, because if you get [NIH] funding, it is anointing you as a good, legitimate scientist”.
Adam Gaffney, a public health researcher and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in an email that “banning NIH-funded researchers from publishing in leading medical journals and requiring them to publish only in journals that carry the RFK Jr seal of approval would delegitimise taxpayer-funded research”.
He said that drug approvals are based on sound science, and that while steps should be taken to ensure that commercial interests don’t impact “the conduct or reporting of science,” this was unlikely to happen given the Trump administration’s cuts to public health and research funding, as well as Kennedy’s own anti-vaccine views.
The podcast episode was released soon after Kennedy bypassed the CDC and declared that his department would stop recommending the coronavirus vaccine for healthy pregnant women and children.
Last week, the administration released what it called “The MAHA Report,” which challenged mainstream medical consensus on issues such as vaccines. Medical experts said some of the report’s suggestions stretched the limits of science, The Washington Post reported, while several sections of the report offered misleading representations of findings in scientific papers.
Kennedy’s remarks and the report come amid growing concern in the scientific community about Trump administration actions that have stalled or disrupted research efforts. In April, the US attorney for the District of Columbia sent an unusual letter to the scientific journal Chest that questioned its editorial policies, sparking free-speech concerns.
NIH funding fell by more than $3 billion between President Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration and March, compared with grants issued in the same period last year, and top universities have lost out on government funding for research.
At HHS, Kennedy has spearheaded a purge of about 20,000 federal workers, affecting virtually every arm of the department. The personnel cuts and funding freezes have prompted US scientists to consider moving abroad as countries such as France, Germany, Spain and China have begun actively recruiting American researchers.
