Lunch with Anthony Mawson: Kennedy, Wakefield and the Manufacture of Evidence

February 9, 2025

By Alex Morozov

New York, NY - On Wednesday morning this week, I drove from New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi to have lunch with Dr. Anthony Mawson, the lead researcher of the latest scientific study attempting to show that vaccines cause autism. The study (I will call it Mawson 2025) was published two weeks ago in an obscure journal with an impressive title, “Science, Public Health Policy and the Law” (I will abbreviate it as SPHPL).

As I was driving, my mind kept drifting to one exchange near the end of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings last week. Senator Bill Cassidy, the Committee Chair and a gastroenterologist, commends Kennedy. “I have been impressed that on many things you are familiar with recent medical data,” he says. “But on other things, you haven’t been.” He puts on his glasses and looks at his tablet, describing a large study from 2014 titled “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism.” He takes off his glasses and looks at Mr. Kennedy. “I’m a doc trying to understand. Convince me that you will become the public health advocate but not just churn old information …”

Kennedy responds, “There are other studies as well, and I’d love to show those to you. There’s a study that came out last week of 47,000 9-year-olds in the Medicaid system in Florida, by I think a Louisiana scientist called Mawson, that shows the opposite,” he retorts, effectively ending Senator Cassidy’s line of questioning. 

Note the wording – “I think a Louisiana Scientist” – giving an impression that Kennedy barely knows this work or the scientist. More on this later.

On Tuesday, the Finance Committee voted to advance Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation to the full Senate. Senator Cassidy cast his decisive vote. 

That evening, I sat down to do a “string board” exercise for the first time in my life, inspired by the show “Only Murders in the Building” – our family’s favorite. Instead of strings I googled the names of lead characters, two at a time.  

I quickly discovered that James Lyons-Weiler, the Editor-in-Chief of SPHPL, who is also the owner of its publisher, IPAK-EDU and the author of most of its editorials, calls himself a friend of Kennedy. “Honored to call him my friend; I would love to call him “Mr. President,” he tweeted in June 2024, above a photo of them walking together.

The Mawson paper lists National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) as the sponsor. Google led me to its Chief Marketing Officer, Susan Sweetin, who, according to a friend, asked Kennedy if he wanted supporters in the Senate building during the hearings. “Yes. A Tsunami,” he replied. OK, they know each other well, I concluded. Another string. 

I then looked at SPHPL’s editorial board. Every journal has them – a group of scientists responsible for the quality of publications. They are bound by a strict Code of Conduct developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics. SPHPL has 34 editors – a lot. 

My first thought was, is this a predatory journal? This scourge has plagued the research community for years. 

The term was coined in 2010 by Jeffrey Beall at the University of Colorado, Denver. Beall obtained a Master of Science in Library Science in 1990 and became a prominent researcher, published a series of papers on cataloguing and indexing of scientific literature. This was the time when libraries paid subscription fees for hundreds of journals that filled miles of dusty brown folios of “issues” bound into “volumes.” Soon this became unsustainable, and a new concept was born – an open access online journal, where the authors paid, rather than the readers.  What happened next changed Beall’s life. “And then predatory journals, those using the author-pays model just for their own profit, started to appear. I first noticed them in 2008 and 2009, when I received spam emails soliciting me to submit to broad-scoped, newly-launched library science journals I had never heard of before,” he recalls. 

Spotting predatory journals can be difficult, Beall warns. “They aim to dupe researchers, especially those inexperienced in scholarly communication. They set up websites that closely resemble those of legitimate online publishers, and publish journals of questionable and downright low quality.” 

Beall started to keep a list of predatory journals to warn researchers that soon became known around the world as “Beall’s list.” Then the threats from predatory publishers came. Ultimately, in 2017, Beall was forced to shut down his list – at the time it had over 1000 publishers.  Another volunteer took over anonymously, and only recently revealed himself. 

According to the latest count, there are more than 15,000 predatory journals. Last months’ joined statement by leaders of the NLM, ICMJE, and top international journals in the UK, France, Korea, India and Germany called for increased awareness. Experts in Korea and Australia call for government intervention.  

As an aside, I pictured Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human Services. The National Library of Medicine (NLM), “the world’s largest biomedical library and a national resource for health professionals, scientists, and the public,” is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and would be fully under his control. Is he qualified to address the issue of predatory journals, given that he calls all medical journals “part of a “Medical Cartel”’ and “utterly corrupted instruments of pharma”?

I looked closely at the SPHPL editorial board, and specifically at the 18 editors in the section called “Clinical.” Maybe some of them don’t know they are even listed there, I thought – a tell-tale sign of a predatory journal. But I quickly realized that this was no ordinary predatory journal. 

Of the 18 members of the Clinical Editorial Board, 15 profess extreme anti-vaccine views. Peter McCullough, Pierre Kory and Paul Marik are on it, all frequently cited by Mr Kennedy in his 2023 book Vax-Unvax. Peter McCullough was a guest on Kennedy’s podcast twice. Paul Marik and Pierre Kory are prominently featured on the website of  Children’s Health Defense (CHD) that Kennedy founded. All three had their American Board of Internal Medicine certifications revoked recently. Another, Harald Walach, had his university affiliation terminated. Yet another, Aseem Malhotra, was named in a General Medical Council judicial review in the UK. And so on.

I got in touch with one of the three who had no obvious association with anti-vaccine views based on my online search, Rainer J Klement, asking whether he knew he was on it. He told me “of course,” and that he and the other editors are fully aware of their anti-vaccine bias and consider the journal to be a “safe haven” for papers that are rejected elsewhere.