During his appearance on the Theo Von podcast, Secretary for Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered his criticisms about medical journals and their relationship with pharmaceutical companies.
Kennedy’s most pointed commentary came when discussing systemic problems in medical research and publishing. “The journals are utterly corrupt because they’re owned by the pharmaceutical companies,” Kennedy stated. “People read a journal and they think, ‘Oh, this is science.’ But even Marcia Angell, one that ran the New England Journal of Medicine for 20 years, has said, ‘You can’t believe anything in the journals anymore, but they’re just propaganda vessels for the pharma company.'”
He continued by citing another prominent medical journal editor: “Richard Horton who are in Lancet who still runs it says the same thing.”
Kennedy explained the financial mechanisms behind this corruption. “What happens, they make huge amounts of money and they make money from advertising which is paid for pharma companies and through a scheme called preprints where the company lands the story. They pay for the journal about a d**g that they’re trying to promote. They pay the journal to print the story and then they get a preprint. So it’s a very neat looking copy of their article with the cover sheet of the New England Journal of Medicine on it.”
He described how this system affects doctors and patients: “And then they distribute that to their pharma reps who are like, you know, former Playboy models who go out and talk to the doctors and they give that to the doctor and say, ‘This d**g works, you know, do you want to have lunch?’ And the doctors then start prescribing the d**g and they think, ‘Oh, well, it’s legitimate because it was in the New England Journal of Medicine.’ But it is not. It’s, you know, you can’t believe what’s in those journals because it’s all propaganda for pharma.”
When asked how to address this problem, Kennedy outlined his administration’s solution: “What we’re doing is open source journals. We’re going to have our own journals that people can open source and publish, but you’ll have the peer review published with it.”
Kennedy explained the limitations of current peer review processes: “Before you publish you give that publication to a panel of experts who then read it themselves and criticize it. And the peer review now is secret. And then there is no raw data published, so nobody can go in and replicate it to the extent possible.”
The new system, he explained, would change that fundamentally: “You can publish the peer review, which is what we’re doing. And so everybody will be able to say if they have 10 peer reviewers and they all say this article sucks, it’s got all these holes in it. Then the public will be able to read that and doctors will be able to read it and the regulators will be able to read it. So it’s basically open source.”
