Three Studies Cited by RFK Jr. to Justify Vaccine Policy Changes Have Been Retracted or Flagged. Now He's Demanding Answers From a Journal.

The Letter

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sent a letter Thursday, June 12, to Lawrence H. Lash, editor of Toxicology Reports, demanding a full accounting of why the journal removed a 2021 paper by Neil Z. Miller, according to The Hill. The paper, titled Vaccines and sudden infant death: An analysis of the VAERS database 1990-2019 and review of the medical literature, examined reports of sudden infant deaths following vaccination.

Kennedy's letter argues that removing research without transparent public explanation is itself a research-integrity problem. He asked the journal to provide details about who reviewed the paper, what standards were applied, and why the findings were deemed unreliable. He set a deadline of June 25 for a response.

Elsevier, the publisher of Toxicology Reports, has not been silent. The publisher issued a formal removal notice stating that Miller's conclusions were not adequately supported by the methods used, pointing specifically to known limitations in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. VAERS is a passive surveillance database that collects unverified reports and, by its own design, cannot establish causation.

Why It Matters Beyond One Journal

The Miller paper didn't sit in obscurity. According to The Guardian's June 4 reporting, it was one of three studies cited by attorney Aaron Siri in a presentation before the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the federal panel that advises on what vaccines to recommend. That presentation was part of the process that led to ACIP approving revisions to the childhood vaccination schedule.

All three papers are now facing formal consequences. The Guardian reported that over roughly the two months prior to June 4, the studies had been removed, retracted, or placed under investigation by their respective journals. In some cases, scientists had flagged problems with the papers years before journals acted, raising a legitimate question about why action came now during a period of intense political attention on vaccine policy.

Two of the three papers were also cited by Kennedy in a 2023 book he co-authored arguing that unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated ones. One paper was cited by the CDC itself when the agency changed its long-held position that vaccines do not cause autism, a reversal that cut against decades of scientific consensus.

The Judicial Backstop

Kennedy's policy ambitions have run into a hard legal wall. On March 16, Judge Brian E. Murphy of the federal district court in Boston temporarily blocked Kennedy's January order to end broad childhood vaccination recommendations covering flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, certain meningitis strains, and RSV, according to PBS News.

Murphy, nominated by President Biden, ruled that Kennedy likely violated federal law when he fired all 17 members of the original ACIP and replaced them with a panel that includes several figures with documented anti-vaccine positions. The judge put the reconstituted committee's appointments and all decisions on hold.

An ACIP meeting that had been scheduled to discuss COVID-19 vaccines was postponed as a result. Richard Hughes IV, an attorney for the American Academy of Pediatrics, said plainly: "ACIP as currently constituted cannot meet."

The AAP and other medical groups had updated a lawsuit originally filed in July 2025 over Kennedy's decision to stop recommending COVID-19 vaccination for most children and pregnant women. As Kennedy took additional steps, the plaintiffs expanded the case. HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said the department "looks forward to this judge's decision being overturned."

The Strongest Case for Kennedy's Position

Kennedy's supporters argue that demanding transparency from journals is entirely reasonable, regardless of your views on vaccine safety. Research retraction is consequential. Journals should explain their reasoning publicly so that the scientific community can evaluate whether removals are driven by methodology or by political pressure. That concern is not frivolous. The fact that some of these papers had been criticized by scientists for years before journals removed them specifically during a period of acute political attention is at minimum worth examining. If peer review is the gold standard, it should work consistently, not selectively.

Kennedy himself framed the issue in his letter as one of "research integrity and academic freedom" rather than vaccine opposition, and a reasonable person can hold that journals owe clear public explanations when they remove published work.

Elsevier has provided an explanation: the conclusions exceeded what the VAERS methodology can support. VAERS reports are submitted by anyone, are unverified, and the database explicitly warns against using it to determine whether a vaccine caused an adverse event. Building causal or correlational conclusions on raw VAERS counts is a methodological problem the scientific community has documented repeatedly, not a political judgment.

Where Things Stand

Kayla Hancock, Director of Protect Our Care's Public Health Project, told the Guardian that Kennedy "has an abysmal track record of citing unsubstantiated sources" and warned that reliance on retracted research drives down vaccination rates and enables outbreaks of preventable diseases. Measles and whooping cough cases have been rising, according to public health officials and physicians cited in the Guardian's reporting.

The ACIP, as reconstituted by Kennedy, remains legally blocked from meeting as of June 15. Kennedy's June 25 deadline to Toxicology Reports will be the next concrete moment to watch: whether the journal responds and how will determine whether this becomes a broader fight over editorial independence in scientific publishing or stays a policy dispute about a single removed paper.