RFK Jr.’s health department calls Nature “junk science,” cancels subscriptions
https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/07/rfk-jr-s-health-department-calls-nature-junk-science-cancels-subscriptions/Open linkView original on pawb.social565
Comments74https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/07/rfk-jr-s-health-department-calls-nature-junk-science-cancels-subscriptions/Open linkView original on pawb.social
Just when I'm about to retire, Medicare will only cover chiropractors and horse paste.
"You appear sickly. It's because one of your humors are imbalanced. Have some bleach in your veins and get some fresh air to reduce the miasma."
Have you tried suntanning your asshole?
Only if I can help Gwyneth Paltrow steam-clean her Gua Chakra.
No, he uses bronzing cream.
demons release miasma, maybe rfk jr should ge tthat checked.
Aaaand thoughts and prayers!
gotta have some tots and pears!
And colloidal silver!
I fucking hate this timeline
Clean eating, like park bear and whale carcasses!
Don't forget to bathe in raw sewage.
No wonder he got that brainworm.
He used to pop the eye balls out of birds heads and eat them raw
He's a sick bastard.
There's a three part Behind the Bastards on him that covers his childhood, young adult, and current craziness. I found part two the most interesting.
You know I'm part of a club where we try to eat one of everything to maintain our dominant position in the food chain, but he makes us look like freaks. And not the fun kind of freaks.
Even if he believed that, why isn’t he calling for more regulation oversight for the FDA and stringent quality controls on the food production supply chain as a whole?
Because like everyone in Trump's government, he is there to gut, cripple, and undermine the public's trust in our institutions.
Clean living in his view just means focusing on "natural" things. Which means swimming and drinking shit water is safe, but anything "artificial" is dangerous. So he's certainly not going to care about pathogens in the food supply, because he doesn't believe they are dangerous.
he in fact believes pathogens in the food supply are necessary to build your immune system
I wait for the new FDA “preferred partners” program
This is all going to be covered by a snarky longform YouTube (or equivalent) documentary in 200 years.
"Why do we live in an underground bunker - 21st history channel"
keep me in the screenshot unless you want your subscriber base to know this guy from the past thinks you suck.
also, we're so sorry. not all of us, but some of us.
Must be why he looks like he has a bad liver or too much colloidal silver, like some dumb smurf-hillbilly Hoosier
I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t Nature and its subject-specific varieties considered some of the most reputable and prestigious scientific publications?
Yeah, getting published in Nature is a career gold star achievement. They’re very high impact (meaning many other scientific papers cite their articles).
And, for that reason, about half the papers (depending on the field) published in Nature are wrong.
I’m dying at the irony of claiming 50% of all Nature articles are wrong while also providing literally no evidence
Got evidence for that bold claim?
Anecdotal only, sorry. I'm sure it varies by field, and it's more about letters than longer papers. There are probably fields where Nature is excellent, but I know that there is at least one where the odds of a letter to Nature being accurate a few years later is about 50%.
Ok, so you got nothing, and you're talking out of your ass. Great, thanks. Go outside.
...
you know, there is a difference between "getting published in Nature" and "submitting your work to Nature". It's subtle, perhaps: one involves being published in the journal. For the world to see and scrutinize.
I bet they get lots of letters that they do, indeed, find aren't well substantiated enough to publish.
Also, one field. Lmao.
Also, please tell me why you made your first comment, I'm genuinely curious. Did you read about this somewhere? Where, if you recall?
that sounds like the dumbest horseshit I've ever heard of, both because an educational journal is built on its reputation, and because even if it were true, you'd still be wrong to imply that's a bad thing for a different reason: proving some other guy wrong is part of the process.
let's assume -- even for a brief moment -- you are, in fact, 100% correct with this claim.
You're almost definitely not, but hey, let's assume.
scientists are all about being right, so much so that they loathe their own frauds (watch some BobbyBroccoli documentaries if you don't believe me), and they also take extreme pleasure in disproving each other. sometimes, good science is in trying to disprove what some other guy or some other team said because "I want to be right/I want that fucker I hate to be wrong (we're all petty humans, even scientists)/I want us to understand the world better, and we need to know if this is in fact as they claim". Peer review is ingrained in their doctrine, that's what good science is. You think if someone, a person with enemies, competition, and friends alike, got their paper in one of the most prestigious educational journals in the world, someone, somewhere wouldn't be going "nuh-uh! I bet I can prove otherwise!"? And at that point it's two scholars betting their career dick to swing around that they're right and the other guy's wrong, unless of course peer review actually means that prestigious journals generally don't publish horseshit.
in short: your claim is not only wrong, it is... a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works as a concept, I feel? Maybe not always in practice -- there's always politics sticking their dick into the mix to muddy the waters -- but that's part of what these journals pay and charge for. Prestigious peers. To review papers and generally make sure that nothing they publish is outright bullshit.
now, are they fair prices for knowledge that helps us all is another debate, but suffice to say: going "fuck you I'm gonna find out if you're wrong" is literally part of the job.
Are you just, like... not that bright? Or is this just a transient phase, a hard night for you?
the problem with this is you wrote an epic takedown. it took you so much more time and effort that the pigshit you replied to.
this world isn't fair.
but you deserve more, you nailed it
it's not about a takedown, really, I'm not trying to be mean (not especially hard, anyways), I just want to understand what Nature, or science as a whole, did to piss them off enough to make shit up about it. Or if they're just having a bad day they oughta just say so.
None of the Trump administration's bullshit can stand up to peer-reviewed actual science.
Citation needed
Because the journal is so highly respected, half the papers are wrong?
What
I'm a researcher. Nature is good but it still has mistakes. Sometimes they are a tad sloppy but they are still far, far better than what you may know from popular science. In general, some mistakes are normal and expected because science works by finding and fixing mistakes, not by immediately discovering ultimate truth. This applies even in math.
I can agree with that. And I'm sure it's because letters on the forefront are published quickly without time to consider all the possible problems.
Doubtful.
That said, you're kind of just describing how peer review works, no?
tell me you have never read a Nature published piece, without saying you have never read a scientific paper
Even if true (which I doubt since you present no evidence) that's still a 50% better error rate than RFK Jr and his band of cranks and quacks.
Yeah that's just stupid
If we go by impact factor (a measure of how often the articles a journal publishes are cited elsewhere), various Nature publications are six of the top ten journals in the world and Nature itself is 15th
Yes. It's pretty much the definition of a high quality peer-reviewed journal.
To RFKJ the only reliable scientific sources are Facebook memes and the labels on quack cures.
"precious tax payers money shouldn't go to unused subscriptions to junk science"
Ahh yes, but it should be used to make the incomprehensibly wealthy, even more wealthy. I really wish there was a god.
Did they just hear the term junk science and went "no u"?
This administration is so fucking frustrating, but it seems they want to remove any meaning of that word, the same way they always do.
That's EXACTLY what they did, yeah. Just like when they appropriated "fake news" which was originally a term describing their own disinformation.
Which also nicely mirrors the Nazis calling everybody that contradicts them Lügenpresse.
That's not new though, Stalin and Hitler both played the fake news game.
Nah, John Stossel was using it back in the '90s to deny climate change. The term "junk science" has always been used as an excuse to ignore reality.
The US is like a reality tv show, except it's less believable.
There must be (or ought to be) a term for this type of conspiracy that requires practically all experienced professionals in a given field to be complicit.
You could convince me that one or even a group of researchers were acting with nefarious intent, but everyone? It's just an absurdity.
It's pretty much the definition of the "grand conspiracy theory". It requires the combined effort of thousands of people across hundreds of countries. It's insanity.
Very much like a Protocols of the Elders of Zion theme, but with educated scientists rather than jews
It's just a repeat of that AIDS conspiracy group that rejected evidence on HIV and made their own "science" mag which folded when everyone died of AIDS
So the modern approach to healthcare is back to leeches and blood letting huh. Did not have that on my 2025 bingo card but in retrospect I really should have.
Well at least we know which publication refused to capitulate to morons.
I wonder which ones they kept.
Damn, what a bad
weekmonthdecadecentury for US healthcare!Was there a good
weekmonthdecadecentury for US healthcare?Everybody knows that real science is peerless.
I'm not as concerned with this as I am with the fascism, because this will at least kill us indiscriminately
My friend, this is part of the fascism.
They're probably already in the data set of whichever LLM they use to write their policy documents anyway, so sure, fine. 🙄
its called pseudoscience=alternative science, naturopathy, homeopathy. he regularly consumes methylene blue.
There is legitimate research on the effects of ingesting methylene blue. Don’t confuse that with pseudoscience. There’s probably plenty of pseudoscience around it, but it’s not (at its core) naturopathy/homeopathy/voodoo.
yes there is, but rfk jr consumes it in his drinks, he thinks that is valid enough.
Unnatural
Lmao.