RFK Jr. Attacks Some Unwelcome Truth-Telling

Robert F. Kennedy, above left with Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign, says he might stop government scientists from publishing highly regarded medical journals. Photo: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

WatchDog Opinion: RFK Jr. Attacks Some Unwelcome Truth-Telling

By Joseph A. Davis

The WatchDog knows good journalists who regularly scan science journals because that is where the environmental science news is.

So Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drew shudders recently when he threatened to forbid government scientists from publishing articles in some leading medical journals. This could prevent lifesaving information from reaching the people who actually save lives for a living.

Kennedy told a podcaster in May that he might stop government scientists from publishing in The New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet, all highly regarded in their field.

He accused them of being “corrupt” because, he said, they published articles that were funded and approved by the pharmaceutical industry. He did not offer evidence and, in fact, all of these journals have stringent rules for avoiding conflicts of interest.

As an added irony, the “Make America Healthy Again” report Kennedy’s HHS produced for publication by the White House cited the forbidden journals numerous times.

 

Journalists — especially those who

cover environmental health —

have a dog in this fight.

 

Journalists — especially those who cover environmental health — have a dog in this fight. So do people whose health is threatened by pollution. Government shouldn’t be censoring science.

 

Dictating the science

Kennedy’s threat was really just the tip of the iceberg. Not a scientist himself, he is trying to dictate what the science is so it will confirm his own discredited conspiracy theories about vaccines. Find background here (may require subscription), here and here.

Case in point: On June 9, only months after taking office in February, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the main science panel that determines vaccine safety and effectiveness, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He replaced them with his own people, some of whom are not scientists and have spread vaccine misinformation.

The panel met on June 26 and recommended (among other things) that people stop using flu vaccines that contain the preservative thimerosal. Concerns about its safety have long been discredited, and it is rarely even used anymore.

 

More things that won’t be published

In his May remarks, Kennedy added that unless major medical journals changed, “We’re going to create our own journals in-house.”

That’s rich. One of the greater tragedies — “in-house” — is the demise of one of the few HHS-published science journals: Environmental Health Perspectives. It is dying simply because Kennedy’s Health Department is defunding it in the sweeping budget cuts he is pursuing on behalf of President Donald Trump and the GOP.

But it doesn’t end there. The WatchDog, ever the worrywart, was alarmed back in January when publication of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report was stopped. MMWR is published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (part of HHS).

The stop came almost immediately after Trump was inaugurated and well before Kennedy was confirmed. The timing suggests the stop-order came from the White House.

WatchDog likes to read MMWR — not only for its horror-movie revelations about the latest emerging global plagues — but because it contains some of the latest environmental health news. Good thing it was only paused for two weeks and then resumed.

 

The lesson was clear:

The government won’t

publish science unless

it’s OK with the White House.

 

But the lesson was clear: The government won’t publish science unless it’s OK with the White House or its political minions.

 

A public communications blackout

Another example: As the Trumpians took office Jan. 20, they put an immediate stop to all external communications — not only from the CDC but all federal health agencies.

The blackout on all public communications was ordered in a Jan. 21 memo from Dorothy A. Fink, M.D., then acting secretary of HHS. NBC News reported on it Jan. 22. The memo stated that nothing was to go out without White House review and approval.

The blackout was supposed to last until Feb. 1. But the chill was deep. It applied to all of HHS, including the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. A separate order forbade communication with the World Health Organization.

As if all that wasn’t enough, the CDC seemed to have shut down its Freedom of Information Act office. Well, first it had fired all the FOIA staff April 1, but we learned a month later that at least some of them had been rehired.

It turned out that the late Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., had started investigating the firings before he died May 21. The law says agencies have to fulfill legitimate document requests, but does not say what happens when they have no staff to do it.

Bottom line: One of the most important jobs of the CDC is to warn the public about possible disease threats. So far, there’s little evidence that it will do so under Trump 2.0. It falls to journalists to uncork the truth and inform the public.

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 27. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.