RFK Jr.’s ‘Hearingpalooza’ Recap; BMJ Journal Retractions and ‘Superretractors’

The following is a transcript of the podcast episode:

Rachael Robertson: Hey everybody. Welcome to MedPod Today, the podcast series where MedPage Today reporters share deeper insight into the week’s biggest healthcare stories. I’m your host, Rachael Robertson.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has appeared in many, many hearings recently. Joyce Frieden and Kristina Fiore will break down what you need to know about the days of testimony. After that, I’ll share reporting on how most papers published in a guest-edited BMJ Group journal were retracted, and research on how a few “superretractors” are responsible for a large swath of RCT retractions. Onto the show.

Over a span of just 5 days. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in front of Congress at 7 different hearings, all focused on the Trump administration’s proposed HHS budget for fiscal year 2027.

Some were expecting fireworks between Kennedy and Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD, (R-La.) who has taken heat for giving Kennedy the vote he needed to become HHS Secretary and all the subsequent changes he’s wrought to U.S. vaccine policy. But that didn’t happen. MedPage Today reporters Joyce Frieden and Kristina Fiore tuned into every hearing, and Joyce is up first to tell us some of the angles she found most interesting.

So Joyce, what exactly did Cassidy focus on during these hearings?

Joyce Frieden: Well, Rachael, at Wednesday’s hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, otherwise known as the HELP Committee, which Cassidy chairs, he began by discussing the medication abortion pill mifepristone. Cassidy told Kennedy in his opening statement “it’s time to stop stalling” on doing a study of the safety of abortion medications. He also questioned Kennedy about the in-person requirement for dispensing mifepristone and similar drugs, a requirement which the Biden administration repealed during the COVID pandemic. “Why has the Department not acted to reinstate the requirement and protect women from abuse and coercion?” he asked. Kennedy said that, unfortunately he couldn’t talk about that, presumably because there’s litigation pending related to the requirement.

Cassidy did eventually get around to discussing vaccines. He said that although Kennedy has talked about restoring trust in his agency around the immunization issue, the trust gap has worsened over the last year because of false statements about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Cassidy said, “I am a doctor who has seen people die from vaccine-preventable diseases, and when I see outbreaks numbering in the thousands and people dying once more from vaccine-preventable diseases, particularly children, it seems more than tragic.”

He asked Kennedy whether the new CDC director, whether it ends up being the current nominee, Erica Schwartz, MD, MPH, JD, or someone else, would be able to reassign or remove any political appointees at CDC who might undermine trust in immunizations. Kennedy said the CDC director does have that power.

Robertson: How about USPSTF, otherwise known as the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — did that come up at all? I understand Kennedy is planning to remake that task force, just like he did the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

Frieden: Yes, it did come up. As you know, there have been concern since last year that Kennedy might disband the 16 member task force, which hasn’t met since last March. At the Senate Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, asked Kennedy about his earlier comments that USPSTF has been “lackadaisical.” Barrasso questioned Kennedy’s plans for reform and asked what the task force had been getting wrong. Kennedy admitted that he has “not done a good job getting those meetings out there” and has issued a call for applicants to replace members who he said are rotating out. He said that “a number of specialties” were not well represented on the task force, and that he plans to increase the number of meetings and the transparency of those meetings. Kennedy said HHS was not going to undermine anything about the way the task force functions, and that he wanted to address some limitations related to the task force’s procedures for reviewing evidence.

Robertson: What about changes to the HHS workforce? Did anyone ask Kennedy about all the workers the agency has fired or who have left voluntarily, and how that affects HHS operations?

Frieden: Yes, that was definitely in the mix. At a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing last week, Kennedy was asked about those cuts by Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) who said he has 77,000 federal employees in his district. Hoyer reminded Kennedy he had said last year that some HHS employees who were cut should not have been cut. Kennedy said that when he spoke to Hoyer, there were 62,000 employees left at HHS down from the original 82,000. At the hearing, Kennedy said that “We are now at 72,000, and we’re hiring 12,000 employees. We will have made up all the employees that we lost, but we’ll replace them with a better group of people who are actually going to address chronic health issues.”

Hoyer asked about Kennedy’s comment that the employees who left or were fired weren’t good enough. Kennedy said they weren’t, because they “presided over the biggest decline in health in the history of the world. … We have the sickest population on the face of the earth. That is a failure of government. They weren’t looking at chronic disease.” Hoyer said he disagreed that the workers were incompetent and that it was ironic that the number of employees would now be back to where it was before.

Robertson: Thank you so much, Joyce.

Frieden: Thanks, Rachael.

Robertson: And now Kristina has a few other themes that came up during the hearings. Kristina, what did we hear about Kennedy’s support of the new nominee for CDC director, Erica Schwartz?

Kristina Fiore: So during the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Tuesday, Kennedy refused to commit to supporting any vaccine recommendations that Schwartz would make if she’s confirmed. Rep. Raul Ruiz, MD, (D-Calif.) who is a physician, asked Kennedy to implement any vaccine guidance without interference, and Kennedy said, “I’m not going to make that kind of commitment.”

Editor’s Note: Kennedy has since reversed himself on this position, saying Schwartz will be able to independently make vaccine decisions.

We also got a little bit of insight into how Schwartz was chosen by the administration. Kennedy said that while he approved of Schwartz’s nomination and had spoken with her multiple times, he had not spoken directly to President Donald Trump about her nomination. There was some earlier reporting that Trump aides launched a review of the CDC in January, and that Chris Klomp, who leads HHS operations, led the effort to identify and interview candidates for the director position.

Kennedy also took no responsibility for the ongoing measles outbreak in the U.S. He kept saying things like, ‘this is a global outbreak,’ and ‘we’re doing so much better than our neighbors, Mexico and Canada.’ But he seems to be completely ignoring the fact that in 2025, the U.S. saw its highest number of measles cases since the virus was declared eliminated here in 2000 at almost 2,300 cases. This year, we’re already at over 1,700 cases.

Robertson: Drug prices also came up during the hearings, yes?

Fiore: They did. During the Senate Finance Committee hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren pointed out a very interesting fact about TrumpRx, which is the President’s big plan for saving people money on prescription drugs. She noted that a brand-name proton pump inhibitor called Protonix costs $200 for a 30-day supply on TrumpRx, but the same generic prescription costs just $16 at Costco. And to give another example of an anti-arrhythmic drug, this branded drug called Tikosyn cost $336 on TrumpRx, while its generic counterpart cost just $10 on Cost Plus Drugs. Kennedy countered that HHS steers people toward generics when it can, but that TrumpRx provided good deals on branded drugs. Now, why TrumpRx isn’t in the business of generics? I’m not so sure.

Robertson: Well, Warren had an explanation for that, didn’t she?

Fiore: Yeah. So her theory was that in exchange for discounts on branded drugs, the Trump administration exempted some pharmaceutical companies from massive tariffs. So Warren and the other Democrats pushed very hard to get Kennedy to agree to release details on the so-called “most favored nation” deals between manufacturers and the Trump administration. Kennedy refused that, and he said that the deals contain “proprietary information and trade secrets.”

Now the day before the hearing, all of the Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee introduced legislation to get HHS to release the details of those deals, but we’ll see how far that gets.

Robertson: Thank you so much, Kristina.

Fiore: Thanks, Rachael, and now it’s time to switch seats.

The BMJ Group announced that nearly all of the papers published in a 2019 guest edited issue of the Journal of Medical Genetics were retracted. Rachael Robertson will now tell us more about that.

Rachael, tell us what happened.

Robertson: Yeah, so this is about a topic collection entitled “Genomic aspects of cancer immunotherapy: Challenges and clinical implications.” BMJ Group announced that seven of eight papers, plus an editorial from that issue, were retracted. Only one paper, a case report, wasn’t retracted, and an external review by a subject matter expert confirmed that that paper is sound. Most of the reviewers and guest editors for this guest-edited issue were affiliated with Nanjing University and Nanjing University Hospital in China, according to the retraction notice.

The journal’s investigation revealed that the retracted papers were, “irreparably compromised.” Specifically, the peer review process was compromised in almost all articles. Guest editors, for instance, selected the peer reviewers. The notice stated many of the articles also had evidence of “improbable device use” which Caroline White, who’s the media relations manager for BMJ Group, said is “when the same device is used by two people who are supposed to be entirely independent of each other.”

Notably, the special issue also covered cancer immunotherapy, while the journal’s focus is typically on human genetics. The current editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Genetics said that “this topic collection was really out of scope for the journal, and accepted under a different editorial regime, when different processes applied.” And because it was out of scope, the journal will not re-review this research for publication.

Fiore: Now, 2019 is a while ago. Why did it take so long for BMJ Group to identify and retract those papers?

Robertson: It has been a while, and this research has already been cited upwards of 350 times according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, as reported by Retraction Watch. BMJ spokespeople wouldn’t tell me exactly how or when the issues were identified, just that it, “came to light through tools that highlight potential problems in published articles” and that these tools “have only become available in the past 2-3 years.” Caroline White said that these retractions take time to take effect.

But Ivan Oransky, MD, who is editor-in-chief of The Transmitter and co-founder of Retraction Watch, was skeptical of this response. He said, “that kind of acknowledgement is not the flex that they think it is, because what it actually is saying is ‘we weren’t doing any real quality assurance before these tools came along.'”

Oransky also said that guest-edited journal editions are particularly vulnerable to being compromised since they veer from the established editorial process, and journals need to have stronger editorial oversight if they’re going to keep doing these issues.

Fiore: There was some other retraction news in the last couple of weeks. There was a paper in JAMA Network Open about so-called “superretractors.”

Robertson: Yeah, you wrote a great story on that study which characterized retractions. And that study found that just six people were responsible for about a fifth of all retracted trials in the VITALITY cohort of retracted randomized controlled trials. Three of the superretractors were in anesthesiology and three were in endocrinology and metabolism. Five of the superretractors were associated with Japanese institutions, and one was from Germany. And several of the superretractors had collaborated with each other over the years. The analysis also found that 18 highly cited scientists who had more than 10 retractions each during their career accounted for a quarter of all retracted trials, and five of them were also amongst the six superretractors.

Oransky also commented on this story, and he said that once someone is identified as having a few retractions, they get more scrutiny, and people find the expensive flaws in their work, which you know is a good thing, but also may make it seem like they have an outsized impact.

Clearly, journals need to continue strengthening their editorial oversight practices to make sure research that gets published is actually up to snuff.

Fiore: Yeah, they sure do. That’s great reporting. Thanks so much, Rachael.

Robertson: Thanks, Kristina. I’ll take it from here.

And now for the weekly measles update. Things slowed down a bit on the measles front. Last week there were 38 new cases, and the week before there were 39. A lot of those cases were in Utah. South Carolina, which had been the biggest measles hot spot for several months, hasn’t had a measles case connected to the outbreak in weeks. One South Carolina resident contracted measles from traveling internationally. However, the lack of relation to the state’s outbreak will not impact the current schedule for the outbreak’s potential end to next week. We’ll keep you posted in the next episode on whether it reaches that milestone.

And that is it for today. If you like what you heard, leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, and hit subscribe if you haven’t already. We will see you again soon.

This episode was hosted and produced by me, Rachael Robertson. Sound engineering by Greg Laub. Theme music by Palomar. Our guests were MedPage Today reporters Joyce Frieden, Kristina Fiore, and Rachael Robertson. Links to their stories are in the show notes.

MedPod Today is a production of MedPage Today. For more information about the show, check out medpagetoday.com/podcasts.