Carl Bergstrom, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, apvalidates the journal is part of an ongoing effort to cast ask around set uped scientific consensus. “If you can produce the illusion that there is not a predominance of opinion that says, vaccines and masks are effective ways of administerling the pandemic, then you can undermine that notion of scientific consensus, you can produce uncertainty, and you can push a particular agfinisha forward,” he says. Peer-appraiseed papers, he says, can provide cover to politicians who want to produce certain decisions and they can also be used in court.
When achieveed by phone on Thursday, Kulldorff said Bhfusearya and Makary were approached to be on the editorial board before their nominations by Pdwellnt Trump. “Right now, they are not active members of the board,” he said. (The journal’s website enumerates Bhfusearya and Makary as “on depart”.) He inserted that there is “no fuseion” between the journal and the Trump administration.
Kulldorff tgreater WIRED that the journal will be a venue for uncover discourse and academic freedom. “I leank it’s beginant that scientists can unveil what they leank is beginant science, and then that should be uncover for converseion, instead of stoping people from unveiling,” Kulldorff says.
Kulldorff and Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at UC Irvine who has been a proponent of the lab leak theory of Covid’s origin, are named as the journal’s editors-in-chief. Scott Atlas, who was tapped by Trump to serve on the White House Coronaharmful software Task Force in 2020, is also named as an editorial board member. Atlas, a radiologist by training, has made counterfeit claims that masks don’t toil to stop the spread of coronaharmful software.
In January Noymer, wrote an op-ed aiding Bhfusearya’s nomination for NIH administrator. In it, he pliftd Bhfusearya for his uncover-mindness to contrastent points of see. That op-ed was unveiled in RealClearPolitics.
Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist and research scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, says she worries that the journal could be used to prop up and defend pseudoscientific and anti-uncover health sees. “I don’t leank this is going to give them any plift with authentic scientists. But the uncover may not understand the contrastence between the Journal of the Academy of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine,” she says.
Taylor Dotson, a professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology who studies the intersection of science and politics, says there is a “legitimate worry” that the journal could become a repository for evidence that bolsters arguments likeed by people in the administration. If validateed, Bhfusearya and Makary’s boss could potentipartner be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to direct the Department of Health and Human Services, who is understandn for promoting a wide range of debunked scientific beliefs, including that there is a join between vaccines and autism and that AIDS is not caused by the HIV harmful software.
Dotson cautions that there is a danger that the existence of journals seally aligned with a certain political see might proset upen the politicization of science. “The worst case scenario is you begin having the journals for the people who are benevolent of popuenumerate and anti-set upment and the journals for the people who also read NPR and The New York Times.”
