Donald Trump's NIH Pick Just Launched a Controversial Scientific Journal

WIRED

06-02-2025

Emily Mullin Matt Reynolds Feb 6, 2025 6:25 PM The journal's editorial board includes multiple scientists, such as Trump health nominees Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, who opposed Covid public health measures. Photo-Illustration:President Donald Trump's nominees to lead the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, are among the editorial board members of a newly launched scientific journal that includes a group of scientists who promoted herd immunity for Covid-19, criticized pandemic-era public health measures, and downplayed the virus.
Some experts are worried that the journal, which has links to the right-wing news site RealClearPolitics, could become a scientific mouthpiece for the Trump administration and a platform that these experts allege could publish dubious research. Dubbed the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, it was cofounded by Bhattacharya, a health economist at Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff, formerly a professor of medicine at Harvard University and biostatistician at Mass General Brigham. The journal is associated with the newly formed Academy of Public Health.
'This seems like more of a club newsletter than a scientific journal,' says Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were two of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto published in October 2020—months before a Covid-19 vaccine was widely available in the United States—in response to the Covid pandemic that called for an end to lockdowns and school closures in favor of pursuing a policy they called 'focused protection.' It advocated for herd immunity by allowing those at minimal risk to immediately resume life as normal. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff also publicly objected to Covid vaccine mandates, a position Kulldorff claims led to his dismissal from Harvard and Mass General in 2024.
On its website, the Academy of Public Health says it is 'an international association of public health scholars, researchers and practicing professionals in the field of public health and its many specialties.' The Academy and its associated journal are both funded by the Real Clear Foundation, which also owns RealClearPolitics and awarded Bhattacharya its first annual Samizdat Prize in 2023, an award 'for journalists, scholars, and public figures who have resisted censorship and stood for truth,' according to the organization. Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, is among this year's winners.
In a February 5 press release, the Real Clear Foundation calls the journal 'revolutionary,' saying it will publish 'cutting-edge, peer-reviewed, and open access research from the world's leading scholars of epidemiology, vaccinology, global public health, health policy, and related disciplines.' In its bylaws, the Academy of Public Health says only members can publish in the new journal. To join, you must be nominated by a current member.
Articles published so far include a review of a paper examining the association between vaccines and asthma, a critique of Covid vaccine trials, and a study that concluded that masks were not associated with lower Covid case rates. The journal also published an editorial from Kulldorf arguing that in some ways scientific journals 'are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse.'
Carl Bergstrom, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, believes the journal is part of an ongoing effort to cast doubt around established scientific consensus. 'If you can create the illusion that there is not a predominance of opinion that says, vaccines and masks are effective ways of controlling the pandemic, then you can undermine that notion of scientific consensus, you can create uncertainty, and you can push a particular agenda forward,' he says. Peer-reviewed papers, he says, can provide cover to politicians who want to make certain decisions and they can also be used in court.
When reached by phone on Thursday, Kulldorff said Bhattacharya and Makary were approached to be on the editorial board before their nominations by President Trump. 'Right now, they are not active members of the board,' he said. (The journal's website lists Bhattacharya and Makary as 'on leave'.) He added that there is 'no connection' between the journal and the Trump administration.
Kulldorff told WIRED that the journal will be a venue for open discourse and academic freedom. 'I think it's important that scientists can publish what they think is important science, and then that should be open for discussion, instead of preventing people from publishing,' Kulldorff says.
Kulldorff and Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at UC Irvine who has been a proponent of the lab leak theory of Covid's origin, are named as the journal's editors-in-chief. Scott Atlas, who was tapped by Trump to serve on the White House Coronavirus Task Force in 2020, is also named as an editorial board member. Atlas, a radiologist by training, has made false claims that masks don't work to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
In January Noymer, wrote an op-ed supporting Bhattacharya's nomination for NIH administrator. In it, he praised Bhattacharya for his open-mindness to different points of view. That op-ed was published in RealClearPolitics.
Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist and research scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, says she worries that the journal could be used to prop up and legitimize pseudoscientific and anti-public health views. 'I don't think this is going to give them any credit with real scientists. But the public may not know the difference between the Journal of the Academy of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine,' she says.
Taylor Dotson, a professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology who studies the intersection of science and politics, says there is a 'legitimate concern' that the journal could become a repository for evidence that bolsters arguments favored by people in the administration. If confirmed, Bhattacharya and Makary's boss could potentially be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, who is known for promoting a wide range of debunked scientific beliefs, including that there is a link between vaccines and autism and that AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus.
Dotson warns that there is a risk that the existence of journals closely aligned with a certain political view might deepen the politicization of science. 'The worst case scenario is you start having the journals for the people who are kind of populist and anti-establishment and the journals for the people who also read NPR and The New York Times.'
The Journal of Public Health is an open-access journal, which means that the articles are free for anyone to access. It also uses open peer review, where the names and comments of scientists who check articles prior to publication are also published along with the article.
'These are good steps,' says Dotson. 'It's good that it is trying to push against the power of the big scientific publishers.' But the researcher also warns that open-access studies might be more prominent and widely cited in the media just because they are easier to find, and not because they are necessarily more scientifically rigorous.
Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, the third author of the Great Barrington Declaration, published a controversial paper in March 2020 that argued that half of the UK population may have already been infected with Covid-19. That paper was a preprint that had not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal but was widely shared in the media and within government, despite proving later to be incorrect. Gupta is also on the editorial board of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health.
But ultimately, Dotson says, the journal should be judged by the science it publishes and the editorial decisions of the people in charge. If they encourage their reviewers to be rigorous and publish a wide range of high-quality papers, these should be seen as positive signs. 'We need to wait and see, but there are reasons to be worried in our political environment,' Dotson says.