Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems better suited as the subject of medical research than its arbiter. He’s not an editor or peer reviewer, and he’s definitely (and thankfully) not a judge. So why is he issuing veiled threats to scientific publications — in the process eroding vital source material for journalists?
His title may be impressive (less so given that it’s from the same administration that appointed a mortgage regulator to run the nation’s intelligence agencies). But beyond that, he’s just some quack with a famous name who admits to dumping a bear carcass in Central Park and all sorts of other nonsense.
Legal authority aside, he is in no position to question brainworm-free scholars’ judgment, let alone censor them. We haven’t conducted a survey, but we’re pretty sure Americans would prefer medical literature not be subject to the whims of a guy who used to cut off roadkill raccoon penises when he wasn’t snorting coke off toilet seats.
But that didn’t stop him from firing off a letter last month to the editor-in-chief of Toxicology Reports, demanding a fuller accounting of why the journal pulled a study linking infant vaccines to sudden death, then posting the letter on social platform X for his millions of followers to see. He gave the editor two weeks to comply — a deadline he had no power to set for a demand he had no authority to make in the first place.
Plus, with thousands of Americans suffering from explosive diarrhea after cuts to foodborne illness monitoring under Kennedy’s watch, people aren’t really in a position to meet tight deadlines right now.
Kennedy is not the first Trump official to pull this kind of stunt. Last year, Ed Martin, then the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter to a pulmonary medicine journal published in Illinois by the American College of Chest Physicians. Martin informed the editor that journals like his were “conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates” and that he had “certain responsibilities.”
Martin’s letter asked a series of questions about the journal’s editorial decisions. Other journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, reportedly got similar correspondence from the since-disgraced lawyer.
Neither Martin nor Kennedy has any legal basis for these demands. HHS, of course, doesn’t regulate what a private scientific journal decides to publish or retract. And as a U.S. attorney, Martin’s job was to prosecute federal crimes in his district, not to police the editorial judgment of a specialty medical publication in another state with no connection to any case his office is handling.
Rather than using his actual prosecutorial powers, like warrants and subpoenas, Martin preferred to send intimidating (albeit typo-ridden) letters on government stationery and then post them on X to kiss up to Trump and his then-buddy Elon Musk.
The correspondence from Martin and Kennedy is similar to Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr’s baseless letters to broadcasters that he claims aren’t serving the “public interest” because they report news Trump would prefer the public not know.
In some ways, it’s even worse. At least Carr, unlike Martin and Kennedy, has some regulatory power over broadcast licensees — just not over their editorial decisions. And at least Carr’s victims are news companies that are likely to have First Amendment attorneys on retainer and some familiarity with the rights of journalists. They’re also accustomed to the spotlight. Niche medical journals, on the other hand, might not check those boxes.
It’s also reminiscent of the Trump administration’s efforts to intimidate law firms, nonprofits, and others. The modus operandi is to use the appearance of government power, minus any legitimate legal process, to make an institution second-guess its independence. The more they get away with it, the more powerful a weapon it becomes.
And all of it has downstream effects on the press. Medical journal articles, like research from nonprofits and facts exposed through litigation, are often cited by journalists as source material in coverage of everything from outbreaks to drug recalls to promising new treatments. When they’re censored, so is the news that reaches newspaper pages and the public.
Kennedy’s conduct, like Martin’s and Carr’s, is obviously unconstitutional jawboning, or use of threats and coercion to censor speakers that the government can’t censor directly. It’s something conservatives used to oppose, in far less egregious cases than this one. It needs to stop.
Kennedy might have once gotten away with severing that poor raccoon from its manhood, but he should not get away with severing journalists from reliable sources.
