The editor-in-chief of a prominent medical journal has rejected Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s call to retract a study that found no links between childhood vaccination and 50 chronic health disorders.
Reuters reported on Monday that the Annals of Internal Medicine will not retract the 2025 study, which analyzed data from 1.2 million Danish children and focused on vaccines that contain aluminum.
“I see no reason for retraction,” said Dr. Christine Laine, the head of the journal and a professor of medicine at Thomas Jefferson University.
The Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary published an op-ed on Trial Site News earlier this month with the title “Flawed Science, Bought Conclusion: The Aluminum Vaccine Study the Media Won’t Question” that described the Danish study as “so deeply flawed it functions not as science but as a deceitful propaganda stunt by the pharmaceutical industry.”
The op-ed further attacked the study’s lead author, Anders Hviid, for accepting funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation.
Hviid rebuked the secretary in a response on Trial Site News, writing that “none of the critiques put forward by the Secretary are substantive.”
The lead author pointed out that it would be impossible to address two of Kennedy’s primary critiques—that the study lacked a control group and didn’t present the raw data it was based on—due to the lack of unvaccinated Danish children and because of a Danish law prohibiting the release of individual-level medical data.
Kennedy raised eyebrows in May when he suggested on a podcast that he would require government scientists to publish their work in “in house” journals rather than traditional peer-reviewed publications.
In that interview, he did not name the Annals as one of the journals he regarded as “corrupt,” but he did target The Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association—all of which are widely cited among researchers.
In recent weeks, he’s encountered fierce blowback for axing $500 million worth of funding for mRNA vaccine development and replacing all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
Almost seven months into his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, the U.S. has seen measles cases hit a 30-year high. The number of people who say they can’t afford medical care has also hit an all-time high.
An HHS spokesperson did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
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