RFK Jr. Denigrates Privately Funded Medical Research
President Donald Trump’s second administration has targeted government spending in various forms. One example is federal funding for medical research: Trump has cut at least $1.8 billion in funding for grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to an analysis published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and his annual budget proposal would cut NIH funding even further.
On its own, this scenario is not as alarming as some may say. Private companies spend more on medical research per year than the federal government. But this week, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took a shot at private funders as well—raising the question: Who does the administration think should fund medical research?
“NIH has $46 billion that it allocates to science every year,” Kennedy said on an episode of the podcast The Ultimate Human. “Unfortunately, that system has been corrupted through a number of different vectors, so the people who get the money tend to be people who have been approved by the industry.”
Kennedy called the current system “an old boys’ network,” where private actors fund studies primarily dedicated to preserving pharmaceutical companies’ profits. “The private funding is coming from industries,” he added, who “write the outcome before they write the study, in many cases.”
While Kennedy briefly allowed that “that also happens in the public sphere,” he placed the majority of the blame squarely on the private sector, and he targeted medical journals for punishment.
“We’re probably going to stop publishing in The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” he charged. “Unless these journals change dramatically, we are going to stop NIH scientists from publishing there, and we’re going to create our own journals in-house.”
Ironically, The Lancet‘s biggest and most infamous scandal involved a 1998 study determining a link between the MMR vaccine—ro
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