Sample Ballots
Sample Ballots

Latest Updates – July 2, 2025

Jul 2, 2025

Latest Updates - July 2, 2025 Including Attacks on Medical Journals

You may wish to look at the following items in concert:

 

  • July 1, 2025 order and opinion of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals denying the government’s request to stay a district court order preventing the government from detaining a Georgetown scholar, Dr. Badar Khan Suri, pending the disposition of his habeas petition with a dissenting opinion.

  • July 1, 2025 memorandum and order from Judge Melissa R. DuBose  of the District Court of Rhode Island granting a preliminary injunction preventing sweeping cuts to agencies including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Office of Head Start, and other divisions of the federal health department.

  • June 30, 2025 Stat News essay by Marcia Angell, Jerome P. Kassirer, and Robert Steinbrook entitled, RFK Jr. says medical journals are ‘corrupt.’ As former NEJM editors, we know he’s wrong.  Before looking at the article below you may wish to consider the following concluding paragraph

Kennedy’s stewardship of HHS has been a key weapon in the Trump administration’s war on science. Gutting the NIH (and handing the drug companies even more control over key pharmaceutical research in the United States) is one front in this war. Demonizing medical journals that criticize the administration’s actions is another. The next time Kennedy appears on a podcast he can quote us on that.

RFK Jr. says medical journals are ‘corrupt.’ As former NEJM editors, we know he’s wrong

And his ‘fixes’ will only exacerbate the problems he seeks to address

By Marcia Angell, Jerome P. Kassirer, and Robert Steinbrook Stat News June 30, 2025

Angell and Kassirer are former editors-in-chief of the NEJM. Steinbrook is a former editor at the NEJM and JAMA Internal Medicine.

image001.jpg

Adobe

American medical research is a unique source of national pride and reputation — some would say the United States’ most important export. Yet Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems bent on destroying our greatest successes.

As the latest strike, Kennedy is going after the publications that disseminate medical research. In a recent podcast, he warned that he might bar National Institutes of Health scientists from publishing their research in top medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the Lancet. He claimed that these journals are “corrupt” because the studies they publish are often funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

All of us are former editors of the NEJM; two of us are former editors-in-chief. In the podcast, Kennedy claimed that one of us (Angell) said, “We are no longer a science journal, we are a vessel for pharmaceutical propaganda.” In fact, what Angell said in a 2009 article was that “it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published,” due to researchers’ financial ties with pharmaceutical companies.

Kennedy is right that the dependence of medical research on pharmaceutical funding is a problem. But Kennedy’s actions as head of HHS — including his deep cuts to the National Institutes of Health and targeting of our best medical journals — will make that problem worse.

Journals like the NEJM did not create the problem of drug company-funded research. Scientists have increasingly turned to pharmaceutical companies because they provide ready and generous support for research that they hope will bolster their sales. Of course, that funding comes with explicit or implicit pressure on researchers to find and publish only positive results, which can seriously distort their work.

To varying degrees, medical journals have attempted to mitigate the effects of this problem. An earlier editor-in-chief of the NEJM, Arnold S. Relman, blazed a path in 1984 when he instituted a policy requiring authors to disclose associations they had with businesses that could be affected by their research. Editors themselves could have no financial interest in any business relevant to clinical medicine. In 1990, the NEJM implemented a ban on publishing editorials and reviews by authors with financial holdings in a company whose product figured prominently in the article. Many medical journals followed suit. As editors, and to this day, we have all followed this policy and have had no financial associations with any biomedical companies.

But absent a change in how research is funded, medical journals can only manage these conflicts of interest; they can’t prevent them. As one of us has argued, researchers must wean themselves almost entirely from drug company money. And they can do this only if they have a reliable alternative source of funding. If we want U.S. scientists to rely less on pharmaceutical dollars, we must make more NIH or other governmental dollars available.

Rather than strengthening the NIH, however, Kennedy is dismantling it. Between Feb. 28 and March 28, the NIH terminated 780 grants or parts of grants. The Trump administration has fired 1,300 NIH employees and plans to cut about 40% of its budget. In 2023, Kennedy suggested that the NIH should stop funding research on infectious diseases altogether for eight years, a statement he still has not disavowed. The result of these cuts will be unnecessary illness and death. They will also drive even more scientists into the arms of the pharmaceutical industry, further eroding the integrity of medical research.

Given the entirely predictable result of shifting research funding from the NIH to the private sector, Kennedy’s stated concerns about drug company-funded research ring hollow. Moreover, his solution — to require NIH scientists to publish their studies in newly created “in-house” journals — is nonsensical. What perverts the research isn’t the journal where it’s published; it’s the funding and other financial associations between researchers and industry. Indeed, the financial conflicts of interest permeating medical research make evaluation by skilled editors, such as those employed by the NEJM, and independent reviewers even more essential: Their job is to ferret out bad science. Readers rely on their expertise.

Redirecting researchers to new journals with dubious scientific standards will only make published research less reliable. With others, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary recently launched their own journal, the Journal of the Academy of Public Health. According to its author guidelines, only vetted authors — members of a newly formed body, the Academy of Public Health (hand-picked by three directors), and some others selected based on their prior research— are permitted to submit articles. And all submitted articles are published, alongside peer review. This low bar for publication is supposedly in the interest of timeliness, and readers are supposed to feel reassured that only “prominent and well-published scientists” will be selected for the academy. But one could hardly devise a better formula for the promotion of sloppy or biased science. Such a publication could be a convenient platform for Kennedy’s own odd, unscientific convictions while he undermines independent platforms for the science that has overwhelmingly rejected them.

Aside from being perhaps the most well-respected in the world, the three medical journals Kennedy named have one conspicuous thing in common. This spring, the NEJM published an editorial by the current editor-in-chief criticizing the “assault” on scientific research by the Trump administration, and two of us published an opinion piece in the Boston Globe called “Medical journals need to fight back against Trump attacks.” An editorial by the editors of the Lancet strongly condemned the dismemberment of the NIH, CDC, FDA, and other essential federal programs, and joined the growing list of science organizations calling for Kennedy’s resignation. And JAMA published an editorial criticizing the how the administration has silenced scientific discourse. Against this backdrop, Kennedy’s plan smacks more of retaliation than reform.

Kennedy’s stewardship of HHS has been a key weapon in the Trump administration’s war on science. Gutting the NIH (and handing the drug companies even more control over key pharmaceutical research in the United States) is one front in this war. Demonizing medical journals that criticize the administration’s actions is another. The next time Kennedy appears on a podcast he can quote us on that.

Marcia Angell, M.D., and Jerome P. Kassirer, M.D., are former editors-in-chief of the NEJM, and Kassirer is a distinguished professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. Robert Steinbrook, M.D., is director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen and a former editor at the NEJM and JAMA Internal Medicine.