Trump’s NIH Pick Co-Founded New Journal

Page Med today history.

A new journal claims to improve the publishing process through open access and public peer review, but it was co-founded by researchers who have challenged the U.S. response to COVID-19 — including President Trump’s pick to lead the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD.

Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, PhD, founded the Journal of the Academy of Public Healthwhere “good scientists can publish the findings of their studies,” Kulldorff said in an article on X.

Kulldorff described the background to the journal’s launch in one perspective, accusing commercial publishers of having a place in the market, with universities paying “a huge sum for journals containing articles both written and reviewed by their own scientists, which they provide to the journals for free.”

“As a result, scientific journal publishers have enormous profit margins, reaching almost 40%,” Kulldorff said in the Perspective.

Unlike traditional publishing, Kulldorff said his journal would be open access, have open peer review, pay reviewers for their work, and remove “article gatekeeping” to allow scientists to “publish all of their research results in a timely and efficient manner.”

Among the journal’s editorial board members are researchers who have touted ideas about COVID-19 that went against the grain, including Scott Atlas, MD, and John Ioannidis, MD, both of Stanford University in California, and Sunetra Gupta, PhD, of the University of Oxford in England.

Atlas is a radiologist who was part of Trump’s COVID advisory team during his first administration and advocated for reopening the economy while the country waited for a COVID vaccine. Ioannidis sparked controversy for an April 2020 preprint suggesting COVID immunity was higher than expected, which turned out to be funded in part by JetBlue, although the authors did not disclose this.

Gupta was a lead author, along with Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, of the Great Barrington Declaration, which promoted opening the economy ahead of a vaccine while focusing prevention efforts on vulnerable people.

Bhattacharya is listed as “on leave” by the journal, as is Marty Makary, MD, MPH, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, who is also on its editorial board.

The scientific community was skeptical of the journal, noting that only members of the Affiliated Academy of Public Health are allowed to publish and that new members are recruited by existing ones.

Carl Bergstrom, PhD, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in an article on Bluesky that: “There’s ‘getting it wrong at the start of a pandemic,’ and then there’s ‘doubling down again and again until you end up in bed with RFK Jr. and found a whole…journal to discredit all academic publications as well as all of medicine.’

Bergstrom stressed that his federal grants are being held up while regulators “make sure I don’t use big words like diversity, bias or gender.” Given the passion these guys have for academic freedom, my guess is that this… will stop immediately once they are in place as directors of the NIH and FDA.

The launch of the journal was announced by the RealClearFoundation, which has been described by some media outlets as benefiting from right-wing conservative backers, including the DonorsTrust and the Bradley Foundation.

Kulldorff’s co-editor is Andrew Noymer, MSc, PhD, of the University of California, Irvine, who published an opinion article in RealClearPolitics about his support for Bhattacharya as head of the NIH.

It is unclear whether the journal’s potential parent organization, the Academy of Public Health, is currently operational, and Kulldorff did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

Several articles were published in the journal in January, including a research article suggesting that masks did not prevent the spread of COVID in North Dakota schools, and a peer review by Kulldorff of a 2023 study suggesting a link between aluminum in vaccines and asthma. It also contains an article on the “history of public health” by Kulldorff and Bhattacharya titled “COVID Vaccine Trials: Failures of Design and Interpretation.”