By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

Stat News hit the ethical and scientific bottom two weeks ago when they published an article by Stephen B. Soumerai, professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Christine Y. Lu, professor at the Sydney Pharmacy School of the University of Sydney.

I have rarely seen so much disinformation in so few words, only 1,220. I reproduce the article in its entirety, in italics, with my comments.

I do not consider Stat News a reliable news source. It has corporate ties, and despite its name, it has nothing to do with statistics, which I thought for ten years till I looked it up. Stat is short for Statim, which means immediate in Latin.

The two professors have forgotten that professors have an obligation towards society to be honest conveyors of science. Their article is propaganda of the worst kind, which is apparent already in its title and subtitle:

RFK Jr.'s war on antidepressants is coming – and it will cost lives. Kennedy's rhetoric is not only based on bad science, it fuels distrust in mental health treatments.

It is primitive and a no-go for scientists to raise their voice by using war rhetoric but they continue with this in the first sentence of the article:

While his war on vaccines may be getting more attention, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is coming for another important medical tool: antidepressants. In November, he posted on X that the CDC is "finally confronting the long-taboo question of whether SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs contribute to mass violence." We fear that in 2026, he may turn his rhetoric into action.

Kennedy has not started a war on vaccines. As health secretary, he has taken rational, much needed, and evidence-based initiatives. He fired the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) because it rubber-stamped all proposals that came to them and because some members had conflicts of interest in relation to vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies; dropped the much too broad recommendations for the Covid vaccine; cut funding for mRNA vaccines; stopped recommending the hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns; and reduced the huge childhood vaccine schedule that made the US an outlier compared to Europe.

Moreover, it is well documented that SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs can cause violence. For antidepressants, the violence is dose-related, and it is highly relevant to study their role in mass shootings. Unfortunately, the authorities routinely refuse to release information about what drugs the mass murderers were on. It has become taboo to mention that psychiatric drugs kill people, indeed to such an extent that they are the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer (much because elderly people may lose balance, break their hip, and die).

Kennedy has in particular made skepticism toward antidepressants for adolescents a centerpiece of his public health agenda, even claiming that antidepressants may be harder to quit than heroin — a stance that ignores decades of evidence about their safety and efficacy. Even worse, he is either oblivious to or ignoring strong evidence that vilifying medications in current antidepressant warnings strongly reduces access to all essential mental health care for youth.

Kennedy is correct that it is harder to quit antidepressants than heroin. The abstinence symptoms after stopping are short-lived for heroin but not for antidepressants, and psychiatrists who have worked with both types of patients consistently say that heroin is the easier one. It can be so hard to quit antidepressants that many patients never succeed and are therefore doomed to lifelong treatment. This is an important reason why many patients take these drugs for many years.

This is FDA's black box warning:

It is ridiculous, dangerous, and irresponsible to argue that the FDA's warning vilifies the drugs and "strongly reduces access to all essenti...