As the Trump administration—including HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—plays fast and loose with scientific studies and facts, there may be a more sinister force at play: censorship.
Transparency and consistency have been sorely wanting in the second Trump administration, but a much more sinister authoritarian evil is beginning to rear its ugly head: censorship. Nowhere is this more evident than in the upper echelons of the Department of Health and Human Services, where Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made it clear that views not consistent with his own will be silenced or distorted.
Britannica defines censorship as “the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good.” Science and scientists speak through studies—preclinical, clinical, population-based and more—so when a government tries to quash or muzzle these studies, it amounts to a kind of censorship that could have catastrophic healthcare implications.
Earlier this month, prominent NIH scientist Kevin Hall announced that he was taking early retirement after HHS refused an interview regarding his recent research into the connections between ultra-processed foods and chronic disease. In a LinkedIn post, Hall wrote that he “experienced censorship in the reporting of our research because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.”
Ironically, Hall had been hopeful of expanding his research given the synergy between his work and Kennedy’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ campaign, which aims to overhaul dietary guidelines in the U.S. and prioritizes the study of chronic diseases.
“I had hoped to expand our research program with ambitious plans to more rapidly and efficiently determine how our food is likely making Americans chronically sick,” Hall wrote on LinkedIn. “Unfortunately, recent events have made me question whether NIH continues to be a place where I can freely conduct unbiased science.”
Hall might empathize with another former HHS leader, Peter Marks, who resigned as head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in March. Marks was given the choice to either resign or be fired after he refused to give Kennedy’s team editing access to the agency’s Vaccines Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) system for fear that “they’d write over it or erase the whole database,” according to the Associated Press.
If these concerns were ultimately realized, the erasure of years of data would also amount to censorship of evidence potentially not consistent with Kennedy’s preferred viewpoint on vaccines.
“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter, sending a collective chill through the biopharma industry.
Marks’ concerns would appear to be well-founded. Since taking office in February, Kennedy has consistently sought to distort or obfuscate the truth. “One of the most notable things about [Kennedy]—the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a federal agency tasked with ‘improving the health, safety, and well-being of America’—is how confidently he distorts the basics of health, safety, and well-being,” Katherine J. Wu writes in The Atlantic.
A long-time anti-vaccine activist who continues to insist on a link between vaccines and autism, Kennedy recently announced a “massive testing and research effort” to determine the disorder’s cause, placing in charge disgraced health analyst David Geier, who shares his views. This study is, therefore, likely little more than another attempt to prove a hypothesis that has been debunked time and time again.
It also has parallels to a memo sent to top NIH officials in March, instructing them “to urgently ‘fund research’ into ‘regret and detransition following social transition as well as chemical and surgical mutilation of children and adults,’” according to The Atlantic. Anti-trans policies have been a hallmark of Trump’s policies during the first 100 days of his presidency. An accompanying email described the memo as “realigning taxpayer-funded research to align with the priorities of the American people.” Because anything that goes against Trump’s political agenda would naturally be “subversive of the common good.” (sarcasm mine).
Scientific censorship by federal governments is not new, and it has not been limited to the far right or the far left.
“There’s objective truth in science, and the extreme left and extreme right have always wanted to deny objective truth,” Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush and current professor at the University of Minnesota, told me last week.
Indeed, the manipulation and distortion of scientific evidence for ideological purposes is as old as Galileo, according to a 2017 article published in The Atlantic. The ancient explorer was prosecuted for his view that the earth revolves around the sun, as opposed to the other way around. More recently, in the 1920s, Joseph Stalin “sought the kind of research that validated political doctrine, not the kind that relied on the scientific method,” the publication reported. In one instance, the communist leader backed a scientist who denied the existence of genes but promised that his germination theory would yield many crops and bring Russia out of famine. Another article, published in 2017 in the Social Science Research Council, points to “the constraints” the first Trump administration threatened to place on climate change scientists, and calls out Vladimir Putin’s “assault on independent academic institutions and their social scientific methodologies.”
“Unfortunately,” Painter said, “most of the politicization of science has been on the far right in the United States.”
Even the Trump administration’s rhetoric—which has alluded to objective truth as “alternative facts,” in favor of its own agenda—is a dangerous form of information distortion. Last month, would-be visitors to two federal websites that once contained information on COVID-19 tests, vaccines and treatments were redirected to a page promoting the lab leak theory and blaming China for its alleged escape—a hypothesis President Trump has long endorsed.
As a journalist whose career and identity are built on seeking and communicating the truth—and protecting those who risk their own wellbeing to help with this mission—I was particularly alarmed by the news that the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, is rescinding a Biden era policy barring prosecutors from seizing reporters’ records in criminal investigations. Without this protection, whistleblowers might think twice before sharing information that would reflect negatively on President Trump and his administration—contributing to an insidious form of censorship.
In her article, Wu describes the Trump administration as being willing to engage in “science theater.” While it’s a show I would normally abandon before intermission, I feel I have a responsibility to stay in my seat and fight back against censorship and information distortion along with my fellow journalists.
As Democratic Senator Cory Booker said in his record-breaking Senate speech last month, “This is a moral moment. It is not left or right; it is right or wrong.”
