RFK Jr. Asks Journal Editor Why Vaccine Article Was Removed

The Well being and Human Providers secretary is asking a medical journal for extra info on why it eliminated a broadcast article that prompt a hyperlink between vaccines and toddler deaths.

Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has made a profession of repeating unsubstantiated allegations that vaccines trigger hurt, wrote final week to Toxicology Reviews editor in chief Lawrence H. Lash, a Wayne State College pharmacology professor, asking in regards to the elimination. Kennedy then posted the letter on X this week.

“People have a proper to know why scientific papers are eliminated, who made these selections, what proof supported them, and whether or not the identical requirements are utilized constantly,” Kennedy wrote.

Kennedy has beforehand threatened to bar government-funded scientists from publishing in some well-respected journals, claiming they’re managed by the pharmaceutical trade.

5 years in the past, Toxicology Reviews revealed a paper by Neil Miller, a self-employed medical researcher, titled, “Vaccines and sudden toddler demise: An evaluation of the VAERS database 1990–2019 and evaluate of the medical literature.” The summary says, “Whereas the findings on this paper usually are not proof of an affiliation between toddler vaccines and toddler deaths, they’re extremely suggestive of a causal relationship.”

Retraction Watch reported that the journal retracted the research in April. The journal’s elimination discover says the editor in chief requested elimination after “post-publication considerations raised by readers concerning potential analysis errors and methodological flaws.” The temporary observe says the journal investigated, and Miller’s response didn’t fulfill the editor-in-chief.

“Severe methodological flaws have been recognized in using [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] knowledge to deduce a correlation between vaccination and sudden toddler demise syndrome,” the elimination observe says.

Miller stated the article was eliminated, not retracted, so it can not nonetheless be accessed. (It’s nonetheless out there on a Nationwide Institutes of Well being web site). He stated there have been “eight particular considerations, all from a single lady. Most of her considerations have been both insignificant or plainly incorrect.” He additionally stated “somebody on Elsevier’s ethics committee” advised him they believed his article contained “methodological flaws,” however “they by no means specified what the methodological flaws have been.”

Kennedy wrote in his letter that the observe “had solely two sentences explaining the retraction,” calling this “woefully inadequate” given “the excessive ranges of public curiosity in vaccine security and a historical past of each overt and obscure stress towards the research of a few of these matters.” He requested extra info by June 25, together with asking the journal to “determine the specialists who carried out this investigation and the conflicts of curiosity these specialists could have.”

Lash didn’t reply to Inside Larger Ed’s requests for remark Wednesday. In an electronic mail, a spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, stated, “We’re conscious of the letter to the journal, and it’s underneath evaluate.”