Not All Govt. Contracts Are Good

The assault on independent scientific journals by RFK, Jr., has a long history, stretching back decades as he has tried to subvert, invert, and pervert science to grift his way to riches. It’s actually working now, as he has worked to shut down CDC and NIH journals during his tenure, threatened to bar government researchers from publishing in independent journals, and speculated about creating “in-house” journals.

• On top of this, he appears to have the power to unilaterally approve compounding of peptides, overruling FDA scientists in so doing, while attempting repeatedly to initiate unethical and eugenic vaccine trials, and leaving our food supply largely uninspected.

Jay Bhattacharya has been an accomplice in efforts to undermine independent journals with his own ignoble history of scientific misinformation stretching back to the anti-vax, pro-business, eugenics-adjacent Great Barrington Declaration and the infamous Santa Clara study preprint of the Covid-19 era. He has also been involved in launching a “gaslight” journal (Journal of the Academy of Public Health).

A main goal of their insidious trade in misinformation given journal trade dress is to muddy the waters around scientific claims. The idea of failings in “reproducibility” has provided them with a great wedge topic to sow doubt in science where early, tentative, or ambiguous (aka, normal) science exists.

To advance their campaign of sowing doubt with fancy but ultimately deceptively employed words like “reproducibility,” in September the NIH launched a $170 million reproducibility initiative in biomedicine, one that was revised after “agency advisers raised concerns that redoing studies would be counterproductive and could unfairly cast doubt on some scientists’ research.”

So when KGL boasted yesterday about gaining a contract to publish the NIH’s first in-house journal and the topic was reproducibility, alarms bells rang on multiple fronts.