Barring federal research from top medical journals could have negative health impacts
Preventing government scientists from publishing their work in major medical journals—as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has threatened to do—could hinder doctors’ access to trustworthy information and, ultimately, could harm health in the U.S. and beyond, according to Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
In a June 4 GBH interview, Rubin, adjunct professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, responded to Kennedy’s recent comment on the Ultimate Human Podcast that he may stop federal researchers from publishing their work in journals such as NEJM, The Lancet, and the Journal of the American Medical Association “because they’re all corrupt.” He suggested that HHS might create its own in-house journals to publish the work of federal researchers.
Rubin said that editors of journals such as NEJM independently review research studies. “Medical journals like ours are all about trying to publish the most important information that has the biggest impact on the health of Americans in the world,” he said. “I don’t think we are corrupt. … We’re all about what’s important out there and how we can best get that information across to the physicians who are going to apply it.”
He added, “There is a lot of good research that we publish that is either coming from federal scientists or funded by the federal government. … The threat here is that important information doesn’t get out to people in a way that they can trust.”
Read or listen to the GBH story: NEJM editor responds to RFK Jr. calling top medical journals ‘corrupt’
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