Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, is demanding that the journal Toxicology Reports explain in detail why it removed a 2021 paper he has cited in support of his anti-vaccine stance. The study had concluded that “While the findings in this paper are not proof of an association between infant vaccines and infant deaths, they are highly suggestive of a causal relationship.”
In his letter to the editors, Kennedy accuses the journal of suppressing research linking vaccines to sudden infant death. However, the evidence reveals quite clearly that Kennedy is not seeking transparency but rather attempting to bully a peer-reviewed journal that correctly identified fatal methodological flaws in a paper Kennedy continues to promote.
The removed study claimed to link vaccines to infant deaths using data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). The journal removed the paper because VAERS is a passive reporting system that cannot establish causality. Any conclusion claiming vaccines cause deaths from such data is therefore not valid. The editors determined the methodology was seriously flawed and that the author’s responses to critiques were unsatisfactory. Consequently, the paper would mislead readers and harm the public. In this situation, it would have been unethical NOT to retract!
Kennedy’s demand for a “full explanation” ignores that the journal had already provided a clear, evidence-based removal notice. He wants to know who reviewed the paper and what standards were applied, yet these are standard peer-review procedures. Framing a legitimate scientific correction as censorship reveals Kennedy’s disregard for science and evidence-based medicine. As HHS secretary, he is responsible for protecting public health, yet he continues to cite fraudulent research that contradicts established scientific consensus on vaccine safety.
The story is reminiscent of the ongoing conflict over the landmark Danish vaccine study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It tracked over 1.2 million children born in Denmark between 1997 and 2018. Exploiting a natural experiment created by evolving national immunization schedules, researchers analyzed the dose-response relationship of aluminum adjuvants. The study found no evidence linking increased cumulative exposure to an elevated risk of 50 chronic pediatric conditions, including neurodevelopmental, autoimmune, and allergic disorders.
Despite its massive scale and rigorous design, Kennedy labeled the research a “deceitful propaganda stunt” and demanded its retraction. However, Kennedy’s criticisms rely on data misrepresentation and a fundamental misunderstanding of epidemiological methodology. First, Kennedy cherry-picked non-significant supplementary data, falsely claiming a 67% increased risk of Asperger’s syndrome. In reality, the finding had a wide confidence interval, lacked statistical significance, and completely vanished when researchers analyzed the full follow-up data. Second, Kennedy objected to the lack of a completely unvaccinated control group. Experts counter that the unvaccinated cohort (1.2%) was too small to measure rare outcomes accurately and would introduce severe confounding bias due to differing family lifestyles. Finally, Kennedy levelled inaccurate claims of financial corruption against Denmark’s Statens Serum Institut, a public research body that had long since divested its vaccine manufacturing arm.
The medical community has firmly rejected Kennedy’s attacks. The journal refused his retraction demand, and independent experts have defended the study as the strongest available evidence of vaccine aluminum safety. After all, aluminum salts have been used safely for a century, and vaccine-derived amounts are eclipsed by daily environmental and dietary intake.
The inescapable conclusion is that Kennedy’s campaigns are not about accountability or about promoting scientific rigor; they are about promoting his dangerous type of misinformation. His continued advocacy of pseudoscience exposes his commitment to ideology over evidence, a truly dangerous stance for anyone leading the nation’s health agency. It is high time, I feel, that he gets sacked before he does any more lasting damage to public health in the US and beyond!
5 Responses to Do you wonder why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken to bullying science journals?
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No, I don’t wonder. Kennedy is an ignoranus – i.e. someone who is both stupid AND an a**hole.
He doesn’t even see the glaring inconsistency in his main argument:
– The total number of vaccines administered increases and the number of autism diagnoses increases → “Vaccines cause autism!”
– The total number of vaccines administered increases and the number of SIDS deaths decreases → “Vaccines cause SIDS!”
Yeah, sure.
Thank you for bringing this important topic to our attention, Edzard!
One wonders, given the obvious logical flaw in the main argument of the paper (it is right there in the abstract), how this paper made it through the peer review process. Just like RFK jr., I’d thus be very curious about the referees’ reports and the reasons behind the editor’s original decision to publish – but of course I understand that confidentiality of the review process also holds in cases such as this one.
But was the decision to retract the study the right on? I have my doubts. In scientific publishing, there is no punishment harsher than a retraction. Retractions should therefore only occur when some kind of scientific misconduct has been proven, not in the more trivial case of bad science. It is quite probable that here, a biased researcher designed a poor study, drew conclusions from it not supported by the data, and was lucky enough to survive the review process – but perhaps it would have been better to publish the critical letters and link them to the original publication, so that they could not have been missed. As it is, we have a decision that looks like it was taken behind closed doors. What exactly were the concerns raised about the article, and why did the author’s response fail to address these concerns?
I definitely see the reason behind the retraction, especially given that the implications in medical research are different than, say, in cosmology – but I still wonder whether a more transparent critical discussion would have been the better choice. As it is, even though the problems highlighted in the short retraction notice can hardly be denied, the claim that “dissent is being suppressed” is easy for people like RFK jr. to make.
“In scientific publishing, there is no punishment harsher than a retraction. Retractions should therefore only occur when some kind of scientific misconduct has been proven, not in the more trivial case of bad science.”
The first argument- that there is no punishment harsher than retraction – ignores getting fired or imprisoned for fraud.
The second argument—that retractions should only occur when misconduct is proven—is directly contradicted by official ethics guidelines. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) explicitly states editors should retract when findings are unreliable due to “honest error (eg, miscalculation or experimental error)” alongside misconduct, and the ICMJE emphasizes retraction’s purpose is alerting readers to “seriously flawed or erroneous data” regardless of intent. Empirical data reinforces this: biomedical retractions were more than twice as likely to stem from unintentional mistakes than from misconduct, demonstrating that the literature routinely corrects bad science even without proven fraud.
The third argument—that retractions are too harsh for “trivial” bad science—ignores documented harm from unretracted flawed research. Retracted articles continue to be cited as valid: the retracted 1998 Wakefield MMR-autism paper received 881 citations after its partial retraction, and 13 clinical guidelines would have changed conclusions based on subsequently retracted studies, yet only 1 citing publication took corrective action. This misinformation risks patient harm, making retraction essential rather than excessive. The retraction penalty (a 10–20% citation drop on authors’ other work) applies equally to honest error and misconduct, reflecting that unreliable science itself—not just misconduct—warrants correction.
Thank you for the additional information. You are right, the removal (I carelessly assumed the article had only been retracted) is covered by the journal’s guidelines: “if acted upon [it], might pose a serious health risk”.
I’m still not fully convinced that the removal was the best course of action – publishing the criticism of the article, together with the author’s reply, would probably have been more instructive and provided less opportunity for the author and RFK jr. to claim that the “truth is being suppressed” or something along those lines. The key would then be to make sure that the critical discussion is unambiguously linked to the article.
On the other hand, I definitely see the point that only retractions or even removals appropriately flag the article as unsuitable for inclusion in literature reviews, meta-analyses or medical guidelines.
The Wakefield paper is certainly an extreme case but also a classic example of a paper withdrawn because of serious misconduct of its main author.
@Philippe Leick
Apparently, the article is only removed from the online journal on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect website; it is still available via PubMed – even without a notice that it has been removed by the original publisher, which I find a bit strange.
This is what normally happens in case of a retraction, and I agree that this would give a much clearer signal, as ‘RETRACTION’ in bold typeface is clearly stamped over all online copies of an article, including those in PubMed.
Maybe PubMed hasn’t caught up with events yet?