RFK Jr under fire for ‘bullying’ letter to scientific journal | Trump administration
US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is demanding answers from a medical journal that recently removed an article suggesting a link between vaccines and infant death, saying their decision is “of great interest to me”.
Public health advocates immediately criticized the move, saying Kennedy was trying to intimidate and influence the journal’s editorial process. The journal Toxicology Reports removed the article this spring after editors found that it was so seriously flawed that it could harm patients and pose a risk to public health.
Kennedy’s letter, published Monday in
“If he is trying to use his position to bully a magazine, he is coming close to violating his first amendment rights,” vaccine law expert Dorit Reiss of UC Law San Francisco wrote in response to his post about
Surgical oncologist Dr., who has written extensively about the anti-vaccination movement. David Gorski noted in a post that Kennedy described himself as pro-free speech, but “apparently used the power of his position to pressure the editorial decision of a private publisher.”
“For anti-Vaxxers, this is free speech for me, but not for you,” Gorski said. wrote to x.
Kennedy’s letter came a week after the Guardian published a story about the magazine’s rare decision to remove the article; The magazine said it did so after an investigation identified “serious methodological flaws.” He explained the decision as follows five paragraph warning It was hung instead of paper. This was one of three articles highlighted by the Guardian used by Kennedy and his allies to justify controversial changes to federal vaccine policy.
Kennedy’s spokesmen did not respond to messages seeking answers to criticism that he overstepped his authority in writing for the magazine.
The magazine’s editor, Lawrence Lash, and its publisher, Elsevier, did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment. Elsevier previously told the Guardian that the decision was made after “careful consideration and consultation with relevant experts”. It said it removed the article because “the recommendations and conclusions presented in the article may pose potential risks to public health and could potentially be implemented in clinical practices in ways that could harm patients.”
The paper sparked concerns among scientists soon after it was published by Neil Z Miller in 2021. Using reports from the federal government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), it found what Miller said were “unusual patterns and safety signals that suggest a highly causal relationship” between the vaccine and Sids. VAERS is a vaccine safety monitoring program through which anyone can submit a report on any suspected adverse health events that occur after vaccination.
Critics of the article determined many methodological problems The article included that Miller, who is not a scientist, misunderstood the nature of the data in VAERS. Magdalen Wind-Mozley, a forensic scientist and vaccine advocate who works at the Oxford Vaccine Group, began making her concerns public in 2021 and said she complained to the journal in 2022.
Toxicology Reports launched an investigation last year, Elsevier said. The newspaper was discontinued this spring.
Miller defended his work and opposed his dismissal. He has previously told the Guardian that he was asked to respond to eight concerns that were “trivial or clearly wrong” and that the magazine never pointed out the methodological flaws in his paper.
Miller did not respond to the Guardian’s questions on Monday about whether he had been in contact with anyone from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He said he didn’t know the letter had been sent.
Miller said he was grateful that Kennedy had sought clarification on the process by which the article was removed, and he hoped it would help ensure “articles are not removed or retracted simply because their findings are controversial or challenge consensus views.”
On Monday, Wind-Mozley claimed the paper was “complete garbage from start to finish, should never have been published” and said Kennedy’s “blatant attempts to bully the magazine here are unlikely.”
