RFK Jr wants to ban government scientists from publishing in top journals and instead create a MAGA-backed publication

Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary claims world-renowned medical journals are ‘corrupt’

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr wants to ban top government scientists from publishing in “corrupt” medical journals and force them to present research in MAGA-backed publications instead.

During an appearance on the Ultimate Human podcast, Kennedy Jr said: “We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and those other journals because they’re all corrupt.” He claimed the journals are under the control of pharmaceutical companies, according to The Washington Post.

The world-renowned journals publish peer-reviewed research and analyze medical findings across the globe. Some of the journals receive millions of visits to their site annually.

More than 1 million people read the New England Journal of Medicine in print each week.

In past remarks, Kennedy has accused government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, of being “sock puppets” for pharmaceutical giants.

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Capitol Hill on May 20, 2025 in Washington, DC (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

The new government journals would immediately receive credibility because they’d be funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said Kennedy. This is despite NIH funding falling more than $3 billion between President Donald Trump’s inauguration and March, when compared to the same time last year.

“It is anointing you as a good, legitimate scientist,” he said on the podcast episode, which aired shortly after he bypassed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and announced the department would stop recommending the coronavirus vaccine for healthy pregnant women and children.

Last week, the White House released a “MAHA report,” challenging vaccines. Several sections of the report offered misleading representations of findings in scientific papers, the newspaper reported.

The scientific community is becoming increasingly concerned that research efforts are not progressing due to the Trump administration’s actions.

Since Trump’s inauguration, Kennedy’s agency has dismissed 20,000 federal workers, impacting almost every department division.