A Star NIH Researcher Quits, Blames Censorship

What are the facts?

Last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) celebrity researcher Kevin Hall announced on X that he was retiring early due to “censorship.” He said his superiors instructed him to remove a reference to equity from a draft paper, leading him to voluntarily withdraw his name from the publication. Upon release of a different paper in March, which found that milkshakes have no drug-like dopamine effect on the brain, he says he encountered resistance, because his research undercut HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s claims that ultra-processed foods (UPF) are addictive. He asserts that his HHS superiors rejected his request to present his findings at a press conference, declined to issue a press release for the study, and prohibited him from talking to the New York Times reporter Alice Callahan.

Hall, formerly a Senior Investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), also claimed that an HHS spokesperson called Callahan to complain about her “writing an attack” piece on RFK, Jr., and that Hall’s subsequent written responses to Callahan were edited without his consent (Through a Times spokesperson, Callahan declined to comment on any aspect of this story).

Certainly, it’s plausible that Hall would be asked to remove DEI references, per Trump’s executive order in January (Stanford’s Christopher Gardner, to whom Hall referred me as a source on these requests, declined to comment on this story). I also believe that Hall’s UPFs-are-not-addictive finding could have alarmed HHS leaders, who reacted poorly. Unfortunately, the NIH has a decades-long history of ham-fistedly trying to sweep unwelcome findings under the rug. There was, for instance, the government-led hit job on the 49,000-woman clinical trial, called the Women’s Health Initiative, which inconveniently showed in 2006 that the low-fat diet failed to prevent obesity, diabetes, heart disease, or any type of cancer—a rather significant problem for a government recommending to the entire American people that they eat a low-fat diet. I have a file cabinet full of stories like these, where the NIH buried, suppressed, or otherwise obscured findings contradicting dominant hypotheses on nutrition. So I’m inclined to believe Hall here.

Still, when I asked him to substantiate his allegations, he said that he didn’t want to share emails that also contained personal information. I suggested he use a Sharpie to black out these references. He said he didn’t have a printer.