from the too-much-free-time dept

RFK Jr. Insists Scientific Journal Explain Retraction Of Anti-Vaxx Article He Liked

We were just talking about how angry RFK Jr. was at a report that he’s been out to lunch on most of what HHS’ work entails, choosing instead to focus his time and attention on his own pet interests, like curtailing vaccine programs in America, chasing chemtrails, and a newfound love for snake-handling. Kennedy denied all of this of course, commenting that everyone was freaking out just because he missed “a couple” of meetings. He then suggested that real journalists would check his public calendar to see how busy he’s been, despite his calendar apparently not being in any way public.

The question that leaps to mind in all of this is where the rest of Kennedy’s time is going, if not spent on HHS’ core functions. The answer appears in part to be demanding that scientific journals explain their decisions to retract articles, so long as they were articles that fit Kennedy’s agenda.

In a letter dated June 11, Kennedy wrote to Toxicology Reports Editor-in-Chief Lawrence H. Lash concerning a 2021 study titled “Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and review of the medical literature.”

The study in question was authored solely by Neil Z. Miller and was among those cited by Kennedy’s former personal lawyer Aaron Siri in a presentation he gave before a federal vaccine panel in support of altering the childhood immunization schedule. Those alterations to the vaccine schedule, and the panel that approved them, have since been blocked by a federal judge.

Miller, who identifies as a “medical research journalist” in his author biography, is a prominent vaccine skeptic, having published numerous books questioning the safety and efficacy of immunizations.

Now, a couple of things to note here. First, Toxicology Reports has a bit of a reputation problem that arose during the COVID era. It is considered a generally reputable outlet, to be clear, but it had several controversies that arose in 2020 and 2021. Lash is actually the founding editor of the journal, but he had stepped away during this controversial period, during which the journal published articles of a conspiratorial nature around COVID and 5G technology. Lash returned as Editor in Chief of the journal in late 2021.

Importantly, that happened after the article in question was published. Lash has apparently been attempting to reestablish the reputation of Toxicology Reports and has, on occasion, gone back and retracted articles that don’t meet his renewed standards. That’s, you know, the work an Editor-in-Chief does. Kennedy’s demands for an explanation why an article he liked was retracted is particularly odd, since the retraction came along with the journal’s justification.

The article was about research the author had done in correlating data in the VAERS database with vaccine injury and infant death. A large problem with such research is, as was detailed often during the height of the pandemic, that VAERS is largely a self-reporting system. Claims of vaccine injury that are reported are not verified. If you try to get at the data yourself, you will first see a disclaimer you have to acknowledge that includes the following text:

Key considerations and limitations of VAERS data:

   •  The number of reports alone cannot be interpreted as evidence of a causal association between a vaccine and an adverse event, or as evidence about the existence, severity, frequency, or rates of problems associated with vaccines.

   •  Reports may include incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, and unverified information.

   •  VAERS does not obtain follow up records on every report. If a report is classified as serious, VAERS requests additional information, such as health records, to further evaluate the report.

   •  VAERS data are limited to vaccine adverse event reports received between 1990 and the most recent date for which data are available.

   •  VAERS data do not represent all known safety information for a vaccine and should be interpreted in the context of other scientific information.

And the justification for the retraction follows along those lines.

In its removal notice, Elsevier, the publisher of Toxicology Reports, stated, “Given the inherent limitations of passive reporting systems, including the expected temporal clustering of events independent of causality, the conclusions presented in the article are not supported by the methodology employed.”

“In light of these concerns, and given the potential implications for medical practice, the Editor-in-Chief has decided that the article should be removed. The author disagrees with this decision and disputes the grounds for removal,” the publisher added.

That’s really all you need to know. The dataset the study was built on is unreliable when it comes to the conclusions the research attempted to draw. And that’s before we get into the inappropriate nature of the sitting Secretary of HHS reaching out to scientific journals to demand explanations on matters of medicine and science when he is neither a doctor nor a scientist. I’ll note that the editorial board for Toxicology Reports is chockablock full of PHDs and MDs.

If Kennedy finds the real work at HHS boring, then he should quit and go back to advocating for people to be less healthy from infectious diseases for which we have vaccines. Otherwise, there are about a half a dozen health crises going on right now that he could work on instead of harassing the editors of science journals about their independent editorial decisions.