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The letters started showing up in April. Marked with the official seal of the U.S. Department of Justice, the missives questioned leaders of U.S. health and medical journals about their standards and practices, and requested replies.
APHA’s American Journal of Public Health was among the recipients. The letter from Edward Martin Jr., who President Donald Trump appointed as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia minutes after being inaugurated, asked questions about AJPH’s internal processes for dealing with conflicts of interest, misinformation and “competing viewpoints.”
“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications…are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” wrote Martin, whose nomination to permanently fill the U.S. attorney role was withdrawn in May.
Georges Benjamin, MD, APHA’s executive director, who also serves as AJPH publisher, said he was not surprised when he opened the letter, considering APHA’s outspoken opposition to many of Trump’s policies and nominations and its role in several successful lawsuits against the administration. Benjamin sees the letters as part of a larger attack by the White House on science and civil institutions.
“We’re not going to change our approach,” he told The Nation’s Health. “Our journal has always spoken truth to power.”
In addition to AJPH, at least four other journals also received a letter from DOJ: the New England Journal of Medicine; Journal of the American Medical Association; Obstetrics & Gynecology, which is a journal of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists; and CHEST, a journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.
Journal leaders were requested to reply by early May to the DOJ questions, which asked how they “clearly articulate” to the public when there are “certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers and others” and whether articles or essays from competing viewpoints were accepted.
News of the DOJ letters prompted strong condemnation from many in the scientific community. An op-ed from editors of The Lancet in April called the letters an “obvious ruse to strike fear into journals and impinge on their right to independent editorial oversight.”
“Science and medicine in the USA are being violently dismembered while the world watches,” the editorial warned.
Jen Jones, PhD, program director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, echoed The Lancet editorial, describing the letters as part of larger efforts by the Trump administration to “silence critics and silence science that get in the way of private profiteering.”
The union is tracking the administration’s attacks on science. As of May, it had documented almost 350 actions, decisions and policies since January that “may have undermined science or the scientific process,” including disbanding advisory committees, terminating federal science grants, shuttering federal scientific offices and questioning journals.
Jones called the cumulative actions and level of political interference in science “unprecedented.”
“We should expect they’ll try to create a vacuum of good science and rush to fill it with junk science,” she told The Nation’s Health.
In his response to the DOJ letter, Eric Rubin, MD, PhD, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, pointed to the journal’s “rigorous peer review and editorial processes.” Every year, according to the two-century-old journal, NEJM receives more than 16,000 submissions; only about 5% survive the process to publication.
“A small minority of submissions meet our exacting standards for scientific rigor, clarity and clinical relevance,” Rubin told The Nation’s Health. “This thorough process ensures that what we publish is not only credible, but meaningful and actionable for the global medical community.”
NEJM supports the “editorial independence of medical journals and their First Amendment rights to free expression,” Rubin told DOJ.
Vera Eidelman, JD, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said she considers the letters a violation of First Amendment rights.
“It’s improper for the government to intrude into the choices behind their editorial discretion,” she said.
The ACLU is involved in a lawsuit with researchers from Harvard University that challenges the Trump administration’s removal of articles from the government-run Patient Safety Network, a website where doctors and scientists share information about medical errors and misdiagnoses. The articles were removed as part of Trump’s orders against work that supports so-called “gender ideology.”
The lawsuit is asking that the articles be republished and that officials not impose view-based restrictions on private speech for which the government has opened a forum, Eidelman said.
“They violated (researchers’) free speech rights in taking down those studies,” she told The Nation’s Health.
In addition to investigating the editorial practices of private scientific journals, the Trump administration is also pulling its support for publicly funded ones.
News outlets reported in April that a leaked budget document from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed eliminating both Emerging Infectious Diseases and Preventing Chronic Disease, two longtime journals published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Environmental Health Perspectives, a 50-year-old journal supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, announced in April that it was no longer accepting new submissions due to Trump’s funding rollbacks. Howard Frumkin, MD, DrPH, a member of the journal’s Editorial Review Board, said the journal has played a critical role in producing the rigorous science that has underpinned environmental health progress.
“Closing journals like EHP and the CDC ones is tantamount to a war on public health science. It’s absolutely gut-wrenching that the administration wants to do this.”
— Howard Frumkin
“Closing journals like EHP and the CDC ones is tantamount to a war on public health science,” he told The Nation’s Health. “It’s absolutely gut-wrenching that the administration wants to do this.”
David Dyjack, DrPH, executive director at the National Environmental Health Association, called the suspension of submissions at Environmental Health Perspectives a “national tragedy.” He noted that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has likely cited the journal’s findings thousands — if not tens of thousands — of times.
“It’s difficult to overstate the loss here,” he told The Nation’s Health.
Dyjack’s association publishes the Journal of Environmental Health. The journal did not receive a DOJ letter this spring, but Dyjack called news of the interference “profoundly disturbing.”
“Evidence-based decision-making starts in these journals,” he said.
When Karen McDonnell, PhD, editor-in-chief of the journal Women’s Health Issues, heard about the DOJ letters, she said she quickly checked her email for one. Fortunately, no letter was in her inbox.
But McDonnell said the journal’s staff and board members have met to prepare for the possibility and reaffirm that the publication is adhering to the best professional practices.
“Our priority moving forward is making sure scientists who come to us with the highest level of objective science have an avenue for publishing with us,” she told The Nation’s Health. “The power of knowledge can only be realized if it’s being heard.”
For more information on advocating for science, visit www.ucs.org/take-action/save-science-save-lives.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
