POLITICAL BIASES at some of the best medical and science journals ARE GETTING OUT OF HAND
By Norbert Gleicher, MD, Medical Director and Chief Scientist, at The Center for Human Reproduction in New York City. He can be contacted though The Reproductive Times or directly at either ngleicher@thechr.com or ngleicher@rockefeller.edu
Medical and science journals are supposed to fulfill certain basic functions: They are to report on medicine and science, respectively. They are to do so at the highest standards, guaranteed by a detailed, objective peer-review process, overseen by an unbiased team of editors, and using the best available study methodologies. Biases in publishing have always existed and will likely always exist because, at least some biases are unconscious, and others may be unavoidable. This article now, however, argues that political biases have started to increasingly overwhelm medical and science journals and must be better controlled.
Introduction
When we previously in these pages on repeated occasions pointed out political biases of medical and science journals, we did so usually within the framework of a broader question—namely, whether these journals should, indeed, “be political” at all? And if up to us, the answer would be a very blunt NO.
Politicking should be left to general news media, just as those, of course, are not in the business of publishing medical and/or scientific papers. At a time when medical and scientific publishing for several good reasons is under increasingly heavy criticism, including shoddy peer reviews and, therefore, often misleading papers and skyrocketing retraction rates, and an explosion of predatory, solely financially-driven journals, we feel strongly that medical and science journals should concentrate on what they were founded for—the critical and carefully peer-reviewed publication of important medical and scientific news.
In many ways, this would follow the old-fashioned example of general publishing—to, supposedly, be objective, unbiased (i.e., on neither side of an argument), and not news-interpreting, but evidence- and data-driven. This is, of course, a publishing model many—if not most—of today’s journalists and news organizations have officially and formally discarded (among those publicly, for example, The New York Times) after reaching the (in our opinion, very wrong) conclusion that, under current societal conditions, for a variety of “righteous” reasons, maintaining balance and evenness (i.e., objectivity of reporting) between two opposing arguments has in many instances become impossible without becoming an accomplice to something extremely evil.
It, therefore, is not very surprising that medical and science journals embraced the same philosophy and have steered their journals toward openly taking positions toward opinions they consider righteous, honorable, and an absolute ethical duty to profession and society as a whole. In short, ideology has conquered many of our leading medical and science journals to the detriment of evidence-based science.
How medical and science journals went woke
While the process initially was led by some prominent journal editors, it quickly also captured the boards of sponsoring professional societies and of commercial publishing companies, leading to the appointment of a new generation of ideologically quite radically committed editors-in-chief, including Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD (JAMA journals), Eric J. Rubin, MD (New England Journal of Medicine), Holden Thorp, PhD (Science journals), Richard Charles Horton, BSc, MB, ChB (The Lancet), Magdalena Skipper, PhD (Nature journals) and, maybe the most biased of them all, Kamran Abbasi, MN, ChB, FRCP (The BMJ), and—of course—innumerable others. In contrast, not even a single prominent senior journal editor, even remotely associable with the political right, comes to mind.
Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD
Current Editor-in-chief of JAMA and JAMA Network
To the contrary, even old-fashioned, politically middle-of-the-road editors have become unacceptable. JAMA’s highly regarded editor-in-chief for over 10 years, Howard Bauchner, MD, was in 2021 unceremoniously relieved of his duties by the American Medical Association (AMA) after his longstanding deputy editor, Ed Livingston, MD (not even Bauchner himself) hosted what then was considered a politically incorrect JAMA Network podcast on racism in medicine and even though Bauchner issued a public apology for something he—personally—had absolutely nothing to do with.
Quoting from an editorial at the time in The BMJ (more on this editorial later) (1), the JAMA podcast had been promoted in a tweet as, “no physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in healthcare? An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors in this user-friendly podcast.”
It featured Livingston in a discussion with Mitchell Katz, MD, then president and CEO, of New York Health and Hospitals and—concomitantly—a deputy editor of JAMA Internal Medicine. As one would hope for in an announced “debate,” both JAMA editors disagreed on the subject of discussion: Livingston felt that the problem was socioeconomic status rather than racism, while Katz reflected the politically more correct opinion that racism existed and must be eliminated (Bauchner was, of course, nowhere to be seen or heard). Trying to be informative and balanced in its editorial, before publishing it, The BMJ asked the JAMA Network to view or read a transcript of the podcast but was refused “because it had been removed” (so much for transparency in the AMA) (1).
Howard Bauchner, MD
Immediate Past editor-in-chief of JAMA and JAMA Network journals
And then there was, of course, much more to this story: According to The BMJ editorial, following this event, over 7,000 people (it remained unstated who they were) signed a petition on Change.org, organized by an organization called the Institute for Antiracism in Medicine, asking for a review of Bauchner’s leadership of the JAMA Network and for a restructuring of JAMA’s editorial staff. The petition, moreover, asked for scheduling town hall meetings with “black, indigenous, and people of color patients, health care staff, and allies.” And the AMA, of course, complied! Bauchner’s and Livingston’s tenures at JAMA were terminated!
Reporting on these developments in its own liberally-biased ways, The New York Times described those events in a headline as, “editor of JAMA leaves after outcry over colleague’s remarks on racism” (as if Bauchner was given a choice!) and—going on—noted that, “Dr. Howard Bauchner will step down after another editor suggested ‘taking racism out of the conversation’” (2).
Giving full credit to The BMJ at the time (unfortunately, things—as will become obvious below—have since significantly changed with the appointment of a new editor-in-chief), the editorial also included this additional important information, reflective of The BMJ’s at the time balanced and unbiased reporting: “The Institute for Antiracism in Medicine was founded by three Black women physicians in Chicago in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of police. The institute says it is a “civil rights organization dedicated to the abolition of racism in the field of medicine.” We have never heard about it since!
A lengthy search by the AMA, unsurprisingly, led to the appointment of another Black woman physician-scientist with, of course, a liberal-leftist bend. The above-already-noted Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, became Bauchner’s successor and the 17th editor-in-chief of JAMA and other JAMA journals (according to AMA insiders, men were asked not even to apply for the position).
But this is, of course, not the end of the story yet—though we now move from JAMA (impact factor 63.1) to its British counterpart, The BMJ (impact factor 93.7). Both are very prestigious general medical journals—simply another way of describing a journal with a high impact factor. The BMJ started in 1844 as the 16-page-long Provincial Medical & Surgical Journal (see below its first front page).
The 1st issue of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal
Fiona Goodlee, FMedSci, the BMJ’s immediate past editor-in-chief
The journal’s 16th editor-in-chief between March 2005 and December 31, 2021, and editorial director for all other BMJ journals, Fiona Godlee, FMedSci, became during her tenure a medical publishing legend—not only because she was the first female editor-in-chief of an important medical journal at a time when women were still a rarity in such editorial positions, but because of how she ran The BMJ and the other journals by innovating medical publishing in traditional, equitable, and balanced ways.
The even more radical U.K. journals
When she retired at the end of 2021 and handed her position over to her longstanding associate editor, Kamran Abbasi, MN, ChB, FRCP, things, however, very quickly started changing. A highly intelligent and excellent writer, Abbasi instantly imposed his personal political imprint on the journal, which in the U.K. often is even significantly more leftist-radical than in the U.S. Abbasi’s BMJ and Richard Charles Horton, BSc, MB, ChB’s, The Lancet (impact factor 98.4) are currently, indeed, the politically likely most radically biased prominent published medical journals (see photos of both of their editors below).
Kamran Abbasi, MN, ChB, FRCP
Richard Charles Horton, BSc, MB, ChB
In a recent Opinion article in The BMJ, Abbasi, for example, showed no hesitation to encourage medical journal editors “to resist CDC order and anti-gender ideology” (3), and the background for his article is, indeed, very relevant and revealing: The Trump administration, of course, has become aware of the “liberal biases” in many prominent medical and science journals. And to say it bluntly, some of the administration’s responses, unfortunately, were not very smart: Demanding withdrawal and/or retraction of already published papers by employees of the CDC because of “forbidden terms” was a good example. One on this occasion, indeed, cannot even argue with Abbasi calling the effort “ludicrous” (though we would not, as he also did, call it “sinister,” which, of course, is reflective of his personal biases).
The silly order was issued by Sam Posner, then the CDC’s associate director for science (an appointee of the prior administration, who less than a month later stepped down) and, paradoxically, also responsible for publishing a medical journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the CDC. He referred in his written order to “forbidden terms” in principle to terms regarding transgender care of children and young adults following an Executive Order on the issue by President Trump. Had Abbasi (and another BMJ editor, his co-author) pointed out the stupidity of this obviously failed order and then stopped, we, of course, would have fully agreed with their Opinion article. But that, of course, was not the case: Abbasi and co-author could not help themselves and ended up descending deeply into the gutters of leftist political polemics. And—as noted above—this is not where medical publishing should end up.
And we are quoting from their gutters: “Make no mistake (as a reminder, Posner issued the order in response to an Executive Order from President Trump expressing opposition to often irreversible transgender treatments of children and minors)—this instruction is not about defending women or women’s rights, as the Trump Executive Order implies. It is part of a broader complicity of this US government and other political and religious conservatives with anti-gender ideology that seeks a return to fundamentalist values. Exceptionally well-funded, well-connected, and growing globally, the anti-gender movement actively opposes pro-equity efforts, threatening women’s sexual and reproductive rights, LGBT rights, and gender equality—and thus health—worldwide. Gender is being dangerously weaponized. Like Trump’s censorship of CDC scientists, journals and editors must resist this too.”
What is there left to say?
How the Gaza conflict has been depicted
One, therefore, of course, can also not be surprised that—this time as the only author—Abbasi used his position as editor-in-chief of The BMJ to take sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict over Gaza and, of course, did not take Israel’s (4) And we are quoting again from his recent Editor’s Choice article under the heading, “a journal’s job:” “Contempt for facts, science, and evidence does not put America or Americans first; it places political and personal agendas first. This agenda-driven approach is enabling mass death around the world and starvation in Gaza. The US is isolated as the prime supporter of a regime that, despite its status as a democracy, is inflicting starvation and, according to Amnesty International, committing genocide in Gaza.”
Obviously expecting to be criticized for his “outspokenness” (many would call it blatant Jew-hatred), he astutely asked the right question (we already above acknowledged his intelligence): “why does all of this matter for a medical journal?” And he then, of course, gives the expected answer: “Mass death and starvation do matter to a medical journal. Reporting on wanton destruction of health facilities, and on the killing of health professionals and humanitarian aid workers, is the business of a medical journal. Political decisions, as we see most vividly in Trump’s administration, directly and indirectly affect health and wellbeing. Addressing the political determinant of health is firmly in a medical journal’s lane. Medical journals that avoid the impact of political decision-making on health are not doing their job.”
Abbasi, of course, considers himself fully qualified not only to express these opinions, but also feels qualified to single-handedly make the decision that his personal opinion is worth the paper of the prestigious medical journal he edits. Like most serious medical journals, The BMJ claims—for obvious reasons—to publish only peer-reviewed articles. Yet, many of the above-quoted statements in Abbasi’s article cannot withstand even rather superficial scrutiny. An obviously ridiculous analogy would be the publication of a prospectively randomized study on, for example, in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the news section of The New York Times after acceptance by the editor-in-chief of the newspaper because IVF, of course, is a subject of public interest—as recently documented by the paper’s publication of a very interesting, though incomplete, three-part series of articles on the subject of IVF, as we previously noted in these pages.
In contrast to Bauchner’s inappropriate termination for really absolutely no valid cause at JAMA, considering the very obvious Jew hatred expressed in Abbasi’s article (we in this context prefer this term over the term antisemitism), this article—specifically linked to his position as editor-in-chief of The BMJ—in our opinion disqualifies him from continuing in his position and should have led to his firing. Considering the current political circumstances in the UK and the current UK government, this would, however, be too much to expect.
Which brings us to The Lancet, and its already very long-lasting editor-in-chief, Richard Charles Horton, BSc, MB, ChB, who already in 2014, based on content published in The Lancet, was accused of blatant antisemitism. He at the time saved his job only through an “emergency trip” to Israel at the invitation of Israeli physicians and—following two days in Israel—after professing “a new understanding of Israeli realities, and especially of the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict, pledging for The Lancet a new relationship with Israel” (5).
Extending credit where credit is due, Horton held up to his commitment; that is, he did so until very recently. He shortly after October 7, 2023, in his almost weekly Offline commentary, indeed, made the following rather remarkable and insightful comments (6):
“Marches for Palestine are taking place across the world. People are protesting at the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the accumulating deaths of Palestinians from continued Israeli bombing (over 5000 and rising). But what is surprising is how quickly we have forgotten the horror of the attacks by Hamas on Oct 7, 2023. Israeli forensic scientists are still trying to identify the charred bodies of those burned during Hamas’ savage incursion into Israel. Children and their parents executed. Evidence of torture. And 222 hostages, 30 of whom are children or adolescents.
Hamas claims that it does not deliberately kill civilians. Plainly, that is a lie. Nobody can justify their actions as “legitimate resistance”. It was terror, pure and simple. As Israel's Association of University Heads has written, what happened on Oct 7 was not ‘one more event in the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It was “an act of singular barbaric violence which must be thoroughly renounced.’
So why are there not marches to call for the end to Hamas’ violent rule over Gaza? Why are there not protests at the brutal violence inflicted on innocent children, women, and men on Oct 7? This disturbing asymmetry of outrage weakens the case of those calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Those marching in western capitals do not understand the terrorist culture that is projected by Hamas into almost every aspect of life in Gaza. During my visits, I saw medical clinics adorned with pictures of not only Yasser Arafat, but also Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. I walked in streets where pictures of ‘martyrs’ in combat clothes and with machine guns held across their chests looked down over children walking to school. Men in balaclavas carrying assault rifles paraded unhindered. This is the environment Hamas has created and into which every new generation of Gazan children is born. It is an environment that nurtures and propagates terror.”
And he also must be given credit when foreseeing the quagmire that Gaza has become, when already in October of 2023 also writing: “And yet although Israel's plan to launch a ground offensive may physically eliminate Hamas, it will not succeed politically. As the deaths of Palestinian civilians mount, so will the number of radicalized young Gazans willing to sacrifice their lives in retaliation. We know who the principal victims of a ground war will be—women and children.
As The Lancet's 2021 Series on Women's and Children's Health in Conflict Settings underlined, the changing nature of warfare—explosive weapons in urban settings, the instrumentalization of health services in war—leaves women and children especially vulnerable. Khamis Elessi and colleagues reported in 2017 that the 2014 conflict in Gaza led to the deaths of 530 children, a quarter of the total killed. Most of these children died at home, sleeping, eating, or just sitting with their families. Aside from these direct effects of war, the indirect effects are also substantial: displacement, disrupted water and electricity supplies, malnutrition, infectious and chronic diseases, and deteriorating mental health.
In Gaza, these damaging health impacts will not be imposed on healthy communities. Gazan population health is already poor—childhood anemia, suboptimal maternal care, poor mental health services, weak infection control, and vitamin deficiency, all compounded by a fragmented, depleted, and brittle health system.”
Almost a year-and-a-half later, by February 2024, he in a new Offline article wrote, “We all abhor unpleasant deals, but that’s what must happen if we are to solve the Gaza crisis” (7). And since then the coverage of the conflict has been getting progressively more anti-Israeli—not through Horton’s own words, but through selection of accepted articles and letters which have become very one-sided pro-Hamas. One issue in June of this year included three independent very unfriendly articles toward Israel to call it out mildly (8-10), though a letter in the same issue also attempted to create some balance (11).
Obviously still sensitive to past accusations of antisemitism, not wanting to put his own name to it, Horton, however, on May 24, 2025, published a rare unsigned Editorial in The Lancet under the title, “Gaza has been failed by silence and impunity,” accusing the Israeli government of “for too long having acted with impunity,” and quoting a surgeon of “having witnessed many examples of clear Israeli war crimes” (12).
Yet not a word about the remaining Israeli 53 hostages in Gaza, of which at least 30 have already with certainty been murdered, and only between 20 and 23 may still be alive (isn’t it amazing that the world does not even demand to know who still is alive?) And, of course, not a word in The Lancet about the Red Cross having not visited even a single hostage in Gaza detention since October 7, 2023, and—actually—not even having tried to do so. The world very obviously does not care very much about the Jewish hostages in Gaza.
And, Dr. Horton, we are seeing through the charade; The Lancet under your leadership, of course, also does not care!
The American publishing scene
Likely reflective of U.S. public opinion polls which still signal large majority support for Israel over Hamas in comparison to European countries, U.S. medical and science journals have paid much less attention to the Gaza conflict than their British counterparts, though if there was a trend apparent, it also favored pro-Palestinian voices in numbers of articles that appeared in print.
That American journals also have become more woke is also demonstrated by the choice of writers for invited opinion submissions. For example, The New England Journal of Medicine and other medical as well as science journals have routinely published opinion papers hostile to the Trump administration, not infrequently several in one issue of a journal—though rarely, if ever, an article supportive of positions taken by the government (13-15).
Likely the best example has been how the American journals have handled gender transition treatments: In stark contrast to European countries, where, with the publication of the Cass Review in the UK (16), the dam broke, and European countries almost uniformly stopped gender identity services for children and young people, while in the U.S. prominent medical journals still continued to publish articles in full support of such services (17,18). Interestingly, the most recent article by U.S. physicians taking such a position was published in The Lancet (19).
Since medical and science journals have almost uniformly decried the cut-off of federal funds to universities and colleges in response to obvious administrative neglect of administrations to protect their Jewish students from Jew-hating students and agitators on their campuses (20), the developing conflicts between leading universities like Harvard and Columbia and the Trump administration also deserve here some attention. A quick literature search we performed on PubMed was unable to locate even one single paper in medical and/or science literature on the subject—except for some marginal papers in the psychiatric literature and in Jewish community journals. The subject, simply, does not exist in the medical and/or science literature.
Considering the resurging worldwide antisemitism, of course including in the U.S., this rather remarkable observation should really not surprise. The finding is, however, double-telling, considering what prominent journals, like The BMJ and The Lancet, have been claiming about their journals’ obligations in cahoots with academic medicine “to champion diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (19); But, of course, only until it also would involve the Jews! Hypocrisy, of course, reigns at these journals.
References
1. Editorial BMJ, March 29, 2021; 2021;372:n851
2. The New York Times. June 2, 2021; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/health/jama-bauchner-racism.html
3. Clark J, Abbasi K. BMJ 2025;388:r253
4. Abbasi K. BMJ 2025;389:r1176
5. NGO Monitor. October 2, 2014. https://ngo-monitor.org/press-releases/ending_the_lancet_s_role_in_demonization_analysis_of_editor_dr_richard_horton_s_visit_to_israel/#:~:text=In%20this%20visit%2C%20he%20has,a%20new%20relationship%20with%20Israel.
6. Horton R. Lancet 2023;402(10412):P1511
7. Horton R. Lancet 2024;403(10425):P420
8. Zarocostas J. Lancet 2025;405:2038
9. Paris et al., Lancet 2025;405:2041-2044
10. Jamaluddine et al., Lancet 2025;405:2048
11. Zivot et al., Lancet 2025;405:2057-2028
12. Editorial. Lancet 2025;405:1791
13. Yamey et al., N Engl J Med 2025; 392:1457-1460
14. Goldman M. AXIOS. February 6, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/02/06/academic-journals-push-back-on-trump
15. Vergano D. Sci Am; April 2, 2025. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administration-attacks-on-science-trigger-backlash-from-researchers/
16. Cass H. Cass Review. April 10, 2024; https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20250310143642/https://cass.independent-review.uk/
17. Budge et al., J Adolescent health 2024;75(6):P851-P853
18. Aaron et al., N Engl J Med 2025;392:526-528
19. Salles et al., Lancet 2025;405:2033-2036
20. Reardon S. Science. 2025;388(6745):342-345