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WASHINGTON — A U.S. government report on children’s health, produced by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission, has come under scrutiny after a media investigation revealed that several of its cited studies do not exist. The commission, aligned with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., released the report last week.
According to reporting by digital news outlet NOTUS, at least seven studies cited in the document’s footnotes are either nonexistent, incorrectly referenced, or based on broken web links. The report claims that chronic illnesses in American children may be linked to processed foods, chemicals, stress, and the overuse of medications and vaccines, citing approximately 500 research papers to support these claims.
In response to the allegations, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt attributed the citation issues to “formatting errors” and said a corrected version of the report had been uploaded. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) defended the core findings, describing the document as “a historic and transformative assessment” of the nation’s pediatric health crisis.
However, some academics whose names appeared in the report have publicly denied any connection to the cited studies. Dr. Katherine Keyes, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, was listed as the author of a study on adolescent mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, supposedly published in JAMA Pediatrics. She stated that neither she nor her co-authors wrote the referenced paper and expressed concern over the report’s misuse of academic work.
Similarly, a spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University confirmed that Dr. Robert L. Findling did not author a study titled Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Psychotropic Medications for Youth, as the MAHA report claims.
The controversy comes amid broader concern within the scientific community about Secretary Kennedy’s long-standing skepticism of vaccines and his policy direction at HHS. Since taking office, Kennedy has overseen large-scale staffing cuts across federal health agencies and significantly reduced biomedical research funding.
As of Thursday evening, the disputed citations had been removed from the online version of the MAHA report.
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Source: Reuters.com
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