Here Come Two More Enemies of Science About to Lead Vital Agencies
Source: The New Republic
Here Come Two More Enemies of Science About to Lead Vital Agencies
Alex Morozov
Tue, March 4, 2025 at 6:00 AM EST·5 min read
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our nation’s new Health and Human Services secretary, repeatedly says he wants “gold-standard science.” In my 15 years as a pharmaceutical physician, I oversaw over 200 clinical trials in oncology and supported regulatory approvals by global health authorities of 10 novel oncology treatments. I can confidently say: I know what “gold-standard science” looks like.
And I know what it doesn’t look like. It doesn’t look like the science endorsed by Jayanta Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, nominated respectively to head the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. This week, the Senate HELP Committee will hold hearings on their nominations and will undoubtedly send them through. That’s tragic, as these men are purveyors of poor-quality science.
When I hear Kennedy use the words “gold-standard science,” I cringe. Take the story of vaccines as a cause of autism, for example. After Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 Lancet paper was published, scientists all over the world rushed to replicate the findings and could not—not a surprise, given the paper was found to be fraudulent.
So what did Kennedy’s friends and affiliated organizations do? They continued to manufacture such studies, even setting up anti-vax journals to publish them in. Take the latest paper, for example, that he quoted near the end of his confirmation hearings. The authors themselves admit that the company from which they obtained the data for analysis “is no longer in existence.” The link they provide gives “Error 404.” So when Nature Medicine declined to review the paper, it was not, as Anthony Mawson, the paper’s author, complained to me, because of some pro-vaccine conspiracy, but simply because of its exceedingly poor quality.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/come-two-more-enemies-science-110000535.html