Legal and public health experts expressed concern about HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s scrutiny of a medical journal's decision to remove a study that purportedly suggested an increased incidence of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) within a few days after vaccination.
"Secretary Kennedy pretended in the past to support free speech," Dorit Reiss, PhD, a law professor at the University of California San Francisco, said in a post on X on Monday. "Now he is using his position to bully a medical journal, in a way that's reminiscent of the conduct the Supreme Court struck down here. He cites no regulatory authority, and has none."
The study in question, entitled "Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990-2019 and review of the medical literature," was published in 2021 in Toxicology Reports and was written by Neil Miller, a well-known vaccine skeptic. Readers who visit the study on the publisher's site now see a removal notice.
"This article has been removed at the request of the Editor-in-Chief," the notice says. "Following post-publication concerns raised by readers regarding potential research errors and methodological flaws in this article, the journal initiated an investigation and contacted the author for clarification. The Editor-in-Chief determined that the author's response did not satisfactorily address the concerns raised about this article."
