President Donald Trump’s nominees to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are part of a group of scientists who just launched a new research journal focused on spurring scientific discourse and combating ‘gatekeeping’ in the medical research community.
The journal, titled the Journal of the Academy of Public Health (JAPH), includes an editorial board consisting of several scientists who complained of facing censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic.
JAPH’s co-founders include Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard Medical School professor who is a founding fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University who is also Trump’s nominee to be the next NIH director. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya became known during the pandemic for authoring The Great Barrington Declaration, which sought to challenge the broader medical community’s prevailing notions about COVID-19 mitigation strategies, arguing that – in the long run – the lockdowns that people were facing would do more harm than good.
Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who is Trump’s nominee to be the next director of the FDA, is on the journal’s editorial board as well.
JAPH is adopting a novel approach by publishing peer reviews of prominent studies from other journals that do not make their peer reviews publicly available. The effort is aimed at spurring scientific discourse, Kulldorff said in a paper outlining the purposes of the journal’s creation.
The journal will also seek to promote ‘open access’ by making all of its work available to everyone in the public without a paywall, he said, and the journal’s editorial leadership will allow all scientists within its network to ‘freely publish all their research results in a timely and efficient manner,’ to prevent any potential ‘gatekeeping.’
‘Scientific journals have had enormous positive impact on the development of science, but in some ways, they are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse,’ Kulldorff said. ‘After reviewing the history and current problems with journals, a new academic publishing model is proposed – it embraces open access and open rigorous peer review, it rewards reviewers for their important work with honoraria and public acknowledgment and it allows scientists to publish their research in a timely and efficient manner without wasting valuable scientist time and resources.’
Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, Makary and others on the new journal’s leadership team have complained that their views about the COVID-19 pandemic were censored. These were views that were often contrary to the prevailing ideas put forth by the broader medical community at the time, which related to topics such as vaccine efficacy, natural immunity, lockdowns and more.
‘Big tech censored the [sic] all kinds of science on natural immunity,’ Makary said in testimony to Congress following the pandemic. During his testimony, Makary also shared how one of his own studies at Johns Hopkins during the pandemic that promoted the effectiveness of natural immunity, which one scientific journal listed as its third most discussed study in 2022, ‘was censored.’
‘Because of my views on COVID-19 restrictions, I have been specifically targeted for censorship by federal government officials,’ Bhattacharya added in his own testimony to Congress the same year.
Kulldorff, who has also complained about censorship of his views on COVID-19, argued he was asked to leave his medical professorship at Harvard that he held since 2003, for ‘clinging to the truth’ in his opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
‘The JAPH will ensure quality through open peer-review, but will not gatekeep new and important ideas for the sake of established orthodoxies,’ Andrew Noymer, JAPH’s incoming editor-in-chief told Fox News Digital.
‘To pick one example, in my own sub-field of infectious disease epidemiology, we have in the past few years seen too little published scholarship on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. Academic publishing as it exists today is too often concerned with preservation of what we think we know, too often to the detriment of new ideas.’
Bhattacharya and Makary did not wish to comment on this article.