Trump's NIH Pick Co-Founded New Journal

MedPage Today story.

A new journal purports to improve the publishing process through open access and public peer review, but it was co-founded by researchers who 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, have founded the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, where "good scientists can publish whatever their studies conclude," Kulldorff said in a post on X.

Kulldorff reported the backdrop for launching the journal in a perspective, charging that commercial publishers have a corner on the market, with universities paying "an enormous amount of money for journals that contain articles that are both written and peer reviewed by their own scientists, which they provide to journals for free."

"As a result, scientific journal publishers have huge profit margins reaching almost 40%," Kulldorff stated in the perspective.

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

Among the journal's editorial board members are researchers who 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 a part of Trump's COVID advisory team during his first administration, and advocated for re-opening the economy while the nation awaited a COVID vaccine. Ioannidis stirred controversy for an April 2020 preprint that suggested immunity to COVID was higher than thought, which turned out to be funded in part by JetBlue, though the authors did not disclose that.

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

Bhattacharya is listed as "on leave" from 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 new members are brought in by existing ones.

Carl Bergstrom, PhD, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a post on Bluesky that, "There's 'being wrong early in a pandemic' wrong, and then there's 'doubling down over and over again until you find yourself in bed with RFK Jr. and founding a whole ... journal to discredit all of academic publishing along with all of medicine' wrong."

Bergstrom pointed out that his federal grants are tied up while regulators "make sure I don't use any bad words like diversity, bias, or gender. Given the passion these guys have for academic freedom, I assume this ... will stop immediately once they are in place as NIH and FDA directors."

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

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

It's not clear whether the journal's potential parent organization, the Academy of Public Health, is currently operating, and Kulldorff did not return a request for comment as of press time.

Several articles were published in the journal in January, including a research article suggesting masks didn't 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 a "history of public health" article by Kulldorff and Bhattacharya titled, "The COVID Vaccine Trials: Failures in Design and Interpretation."