“A New Academic Publishing Model”: Right-Wing Dark Money Group Launches Fringe Medical Journal
The right-wing RealClear Foundation’s foray into public health has been called “a mockery of scientific process.”
Written By Walker Bragman
This piece has been updated with research assistance from the Center for Media and Democracy.
Last month, a prominent right-wing dark money group launched its own Academy of Public Health, complete with a new medical journal.
At first blush, the RealClear Foundation’s foray into public health research looks like a serious venture. The academy’s webpage claims it is an “international association of public health scholars, researchers and practicing professionals in the field of public health and its many specialties,” and declares that “members are united in their commitment to open discourse, intellectual rigor and broad, equitable access to scientific discovery.”
There is even a constitution and bylaws linked. The new journal’s website looks professional and makes four commitments—to “open access,” “open and rigorous peer review,” “rewarding reviewers,” and “a timely and efficient publishing process.” According to the site, the journal will cover “all aspects of public health, including epidemiology, environmental health, occupational health, behavioral health, pharmacoepidemiology, community health, global health, disease surveillance, biostatistics, medical informatics, health services, health policy, health economics, medical ethics and public health education.”
But many of the names behind the new venture and publication have long histories of promoting COVID-19-related misinformation and contrarian medical positions, including questioning long-established pandemic mitigation strategies and the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines. Several played a real role in politicizing the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic.
Important Context has covered new right-wing groups with prestigious-sounding names that push out propaganda and launder the reputations of political operatives. In November, we reported on how the so-called American Academy of Sciences and Letters, seemingly named to echo long-established reputable organizations, was giving awards to fringe figures from the right alongside more credible academics. In our piece, we noted how the venture was backed by the foundation of an investment fund CEO who has been funding right-wing beachheads at prestigious universities. Another backer of the AASL—to the tune of $75,000–was the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major funder of right-wing causes.
Since the COVID pandemic hit, right-wing groups have been working to undermine public health institutions over their support for economically-disruptive interventions. Increasingly, medical contrarians and anti-vaccine scientists backed by right-wing money have been wading into the world of medical publishing. The anti-vaccine Brownstone Institute, for example, which is a central hub for those voices, calls the blog on its website a “journal.” Over the weekend, Important Context reported that Health and Human Services nominee and anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr., had cited a flawed vaccine study during his Senate confirmation hearings that was funded by an anti-vax dark money group and published in a new scientific journal from an anti-vax LLC.
The strategy of creating official-sounding front groups to peddle propaganda and muddy the waters around science is not new. Corporate interests have been using this tactic for decades to undermine the science and government response to problems like climate change and, more recently, COVID and pandemics.
The new RealClear journal appears to be another example of this trend.
“It is a common tactic to exploit the veneer of scientific credibility to push discredited theories,” said biologist Mallory Harris, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Maryland who studies the interplay between human behavior and infectious diseases. “Unfortunately, given this group's extensive political ties, I expect to see this ‘journal’ used to justify dangerous health policy unsupported by the body of actual evidence.”
Harris was not alone in her misgivings about the new journal. Evolutionary biologist Carl T. Bergstrom of the University of Washington offered a similar assessment, noting on BlueSky that “the bylaws reveal a wild sort of National Academy of Sciences cosplay, dialed up to eleven and designed to exclude everybody except fellow...er...contrarians. Only members can publish, new members are brought in by existing ones, and the editor-in-chief cannot reject members' [papers].”
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The journal’s founding editor-in-chief is none other than Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician whose career trajectory has taken him from the vaunted Harvard Medical School to the anti-vaccine Brownstone Institute, where he served as the scientific director in 2022, bringing home over $100,000.
Kulldorff is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which articulated an unprecedented herd immunity strategy to deal with the COVID pandemic. It urged governments to “focus protection” on the elderly and vulnerable while allowing businesses and schools to remain open in order to deliberately allow the virus to mass infect the population in order to quickly achieve herd immunity with minimal disruption. The document was widely rebuked by public health experts, including the director-general of the World Health Organization, who called it “unethical.”
In a January 30 article on the journal’s website, Kulldorff outlined the alleged need for the new publication, bemoaning the problems with traditional academia and publishing.
“Scientific journals have had enormous positive impact on the development of science, but in some ways, they are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse,” he wrote, adding that he proposed “a new academic publishing model.”
Joining Kulldorff on the editorial board are a number of his contrarian allies, including names affiliated with the Great Barrington Declaration. The board includes the other co-authors of the document, health economist Jay Bhattacharya, a Brownstone alum who is now President Trump’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, and theoretical epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. There is also Scott Atlas, a radiologist and COVID herd immunity advocate who, as a Trump administration science adviser, assisted with preparations for the conference out of which the Great Barrington Declaration emerged.
Atlas was tapped for his administration role following a push by the billionaire-funded dark money group Job Creators Network, which Trump megadonor Bernie Marcus founded. He is credited with selling the White House on herd immunity and inaction, downplaying the need for masks, lockdowns, and testing the height of the pandemic.
The RealClear journal board also includes declaration signatories Günter Kampf is an associate professor of hygiene and environmental health at the University of Greifswald, Germany and Helen Colhoun, a professor of medical informatics and epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Bhattacharya is not the only Trump appointee represented on the editorial board. Marty Makary, a surgeon turned medical critique and wellness influencer, was chosen by Trump to lead the Food and Drug Administration. Like Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and Atlas, Makary has cast doubt on the safety of COVID vaccines and downplayed the need for pandemic mitigation measures. Makary has ties to Brownstone too, joining Kulldorff and Bhattacharya, both of whom have had official roles at the institute, on a team of contrarian medical voices the group organized to advise a potential GOP-led congressional inquiry into the pandemic.
Another Brownstone-affiliated journal editorial board member is Tom Jefferson, a UK epidemiologist who is a contributor to the conspiracy-promoting dark money group where he has written on topics like vaccine injury. Jefferson was the lead author of the controversial Cochrane review of the efficacy of masking against COVID. While Cochrane reviews are generally regarded as the gold standard, the 2023 mask review was marred by controversy due to Jefferson declaring that “there is just no evidence that [masks] make any difference”—a statement not supported by his own research. The Cochrane Library’s editorial-in-chief, Dr. Karla Soares-Weiser, even came out and rebutted the claim in a statement.
“Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” she said.
Another notable name on the RealClear public health journal’s editorial board is Dr. John Ioannidis, a physician scientist and Stanford professor who famously co-authored an influential COVID seroprevalence study with Bhattacharya that was later revealed to have significant flaws, from methodological issues to undisclosed funding from the anti-lockdown founder of JetBlue.
The journal’s other editor-in-chief is Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of Population Health & Disease Prevention at UC Irvine. Noymer has supported and defended COVID mitigation measures but advocated the lab leak explanation for the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ origins. Zoonosis remains the most likely and expert-favored pandemic origin story.
In October, Noymer participated in a controversial health policy symposium organized by Bhattacharya, whose nomination he has supported, at which he suggested that Fauci had embraced premature reopening in order to cover up his involvement in gain-of-function research that allegedly created the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Another connection between the editorial board and the Stanford public health conference runs through David Livermore, a semi-retired honorary professor of medical microbiology at the University of East Anglia. Livermore is on the editorial board of Collateral Global, a UK-based anti-lockdown group Bhattacharya and Gupta were affiliated with as recently as last year that also has ties to anti-vaccine groups. The organization funded the Stanford health policy conference Bhattacharya organized this past fall.
Harris told Important Context that despite the website’s sleek design, the journal and the individuals behind it “are making a mockery of the scientific process.”
“As far as I can tell, many of the people involved with this project are close ideological allies operating far outside of the scientific community,” she said. “They complain about censorship and gatekeeping but it is also the case that it is sometimes hard to publish shoddy work based on bad ideas. Most of us don't create a fake journal to cope with that.”
That sleekness cost money—something the right-wing RealClear Foundation has in spades. The foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit affiliated with the RealClear Media Group, has long been backed by a number of groups affiliated with major right-wing families like Uihlein, Koch, and Mellon. Important Context has previously reported on its funding.
Last year, the foundation brought in more than $8.5 million in contributions and grants. Major backers included the Bradley Foundation ($250,000) and its affiliated donor-advised fund, the Bradley Impact Fund ($110,000). The Thomas W. Smith Foundation, the private foundation of hedge fund manager and right-wing mega-funder Thomas W. Smith of Prescott Investors, gave $500,000. Meanwhile, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Allegheny Foundation, both affiliated with the old Mellon family, gave $300,000 and $200,000, respectively. The Searle Freedom Trust, of the Searle pharmaceutical family, donated $200,000.
Smaller contributions came from the Robert and Ardis James Foundation ($50,000), begun by the prolific quilter Ardis James and her husband, the State Policy Network ($50,000), which supports a right-wing dark money network across America, and the Dunn Foundation ($19,000). Founded by William A. Dunn, former founder and head of the investment firm Dunn Capital Management, the Dunn Foundation has been a major funder of groups in billionaire Charles Koch’s political influence network.
RealClear also received a significant portion its fundraising haul in untraceable donations through DonorsTrust, a right-wing donor-advised fund popular among Koch network donors. The fund funneled more than $5.8 million to the foundation. The board chair of DonorsTrust, Kimberly Dennis, is also the executive director of Searle.
Last year, the RealClear Foundation gave Bhattacharya its inaugural Samizdat Prize, an official-sounded annual award reserved for “for journalists, scholars, and public figures who have resisted censorship and stood for truth.” In 2022, represented by a Koch-funded lawfare dark money outfit, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff sued the Biden administration, alleging that it had coerced social media companies into censoring their content.
The case failed at the Supreme Court last June.
