Ed Martin, the Interim US Lawyer for the District of Columbia, has despatched out a letter to a somewhat obscure medical journal, “Chest” – a journal revealed in Illinois by the American School of Chest Physicians and centered on pulmonary and sleep-related medical analysis[*]. The letter, dated 4/14/2025, was first reported on the web site “Medpage Right this moment,” and was, apparently, one in every of no less than three that Martin despatched out to completely different medical journals.
The letter raises various attention-grabbing questions.
- Why in God’s identify is the US Lawyer for DC within the publication practices of an obscure specialty medical journal revealed in Illinois? Is there not sufficient crime in DC to maintain him in any other case totally occupied?
- Why is the textual content of the letter such a mishmash of incomprehensible nonsense?
What does it imply – in English – to say that publications like CHEST Journal “are conceding that they … have a place for which they’re advocating both as a consequence of commercial (beneath postal code) or sponsorship (beneath related fraud rules).” [Emphasis added]
Why does it say “I sit up for I sit up for and admire your cooperation with my letter of inquiry after request”?
Why does Martin start by declaring that he “obtain[s] frequent requests for info and clarification” and that he “take[s] these requests severely and act[s] on them with letters like this one you might be receiving”? What’s he speaking about? Is he implying that he has obtained a “request for info and clarification” about CHEST’s publication practices, and that he “takes the request severely”? What does it imply to take a request for info and clarification about medical journal publication practices “severely”?
I ask these questions not merely to embarrass Mr. Martin and to chide him for – somewhat unprofessionally – having despatched out a letter over his signature that seems to have been neither edited nor proofread. Somewhat, it makes me marvel: maybe this letter – just like the now-infamous letter to Harvard, through which the Administration offered its astonishing new calls for and which led the college to announce that it could not adjust to them – was despatched out by mistake?
3. Here is a neater one: Does the Editor-in-Chief of “CHEST” have any obligation to answer Mr. Martin’s questions? The reply, after all, is “No, he doesn’t,” and if I had been CHEST’s lawyer, I might advocate replying to Martin’s request with a well mannered however agency “No.” No obligation is (or will be) imposed on the Editor by a letter — even a letter from a US Lawyer – merely requesting details about how he runs his operations. Mr. Martin has loads of methods to impose such an obligation on the Editor and to get that info by way of subpoena or warrant if, the truth is, he requires it for an investigation his workplace is conducting or some case his workplace is prosecuting.
4. Maybe most significantly: What’s the final function – the grand technique – behind the Administration’s warfare on science and scientific analysis? I do not get it. As readers are nicely conscious, there are many Administration coverage aims that I feel are unwise, short-sighted, ineffective, or worse. However most often I perceive what they’re attempting to perform, and why some folks consider they’re price pursuing. Eliminating the Division of Schooling, eliminating US overseas assist, opening up extra coal-fired electrical vegetation, loosening/eliminating environmental rules – they’re all horrible concepts (in my view), however I get the place they’re coming from and I perceive that there’s a viable and coherent standpoint behind them, misguided although it could be (in my view).
However the warfare on science makes no sense to me in any respect; maybe there are some readers who can enlighten me on that. In what alternate world are we made higher off by weakening or crippling our main scientific establishments? In what approach is a United States with out NIH grants a greater nation than one with NIH grants? Identical for NSF grants, NOAA, the CDC, Workplace of Local weather Analysis, the USGS, and so on. Why the hostility? Why would anyone need to take all of them down?
*The most up-to-date subject, for instance, contained articles on “Beta-Blockers in Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension,” “The Function of Bronchial Biopsy within the Prediction of Response to Biologic Remedy in Extreme Uncontrolled Bronchial asthma,” “Danger Components and Scientific Influence of Extreme Pneumothorax After Endoscopic Lung Quantity Discount With Endobronchial Valves,” and the like.
