RFK Jr.'s MAHA Report Cites Research Studies That Don't Exist
The 'MAHA Report: Make Our Children Healthy Again,' which was released earlier this month, purports to expose 'the stark reality of American children's declining health, backed by compelling data and long-term trends.' While the report does attempt to address critical issues and questions related to children's health — including nutrition and the effects of childhood exposure to digital devices — at its core the report is an attempt to backfill Kennedy's more outlandish claims about vaccinations, autism, and medications with shoddy data.
According to a Thursday report from NOTUS, at least seven sources cited in the MAHA Report do not seem to exist. In one instance, epidemiologist Katherine Keyes was cited as an author on a study titled, 'Changes in mental health and substance abuse among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic.' The commission used the study to bolster a claim that 'approximately 20–25% of adolescents reported anxiety symptoms and 15–20% reported depressive symptoms, with girls showing significantly higher rates.' The provided link to the study led to an error page, the journal it was attributed to did not feature a study with that title on the cited issue date, and Keyes denied ever authoring such a study.
'The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,' Keyes told NOTUS. 'We've certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.'
Several other researchers denied authoring studies cited in the report. Harold J. Farber was listed as the author of a study titled, 'Overprescribing of oral corticosteroids for children with asthma,' which allegedly found that about a third of mild asthma diagnoses are overprescribed oral corticosteroids. Farber denied ever writing a study with that title, and told NOTUS that the MAHA resort was presenting 'clearly an overgeneralization' conclusion on the available research on childhood asthma.
In another example, a supposed study — which NOTUS was not able to verify actually existed — seemed to have a made-up author.
The MAHA Report was also riddled with broken links, incorrect authors, and other erroneous attributions.
When NOTUS asked the White House on Thursday if they had 'confidence that the info coming from HHS can be trusted,' White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that they have 'complete confidence' in Kennedy and his team. Leavitt went on to blame 'some formatting issues' for the errors and asserted that the MAHA report was 'one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government, and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.'
Leavitt also refused to address a follow up question asking if AI had been used in the report's production.
The assertions made in the MAHA report have raised red flags even among conservative think tanks. On Wednesday, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, published a scathing review of the report on its blog.
'The data in the report bears little relationship to its conclusions,' authors Jeffrey Singer, Terence Kealey, and Bautista Vivanco wrote, noting the report's opening line acknowledging that the U.S. ranks last among its economic peers in various health metrics, despite outsized spending on health care. 'The graph the Commission supplies shows that, dating back to 1970, the US has always ranked last in life expectancy among comparator nations,' Cato countered. 'The reason for the US's poor medical performance lies in the culture that gave us pellagra, which includes the nation's unusually high level of social inequality for a rich country, regulatory barriers to access to health care, its extraordinarily high levels of road traffic deaths […] its unusually high levels of gun deaths […], its extraordinarily high incarceration rate […], and other obvious social factors.'
The MAHA Report also touches on Kennedy's pet issue: vaccine skepticism. While the HHS secretary held off on putting conspiracy theories about vaccines causing autism in the report, the report includes suggestions that the current childhood vaccination schedule was potentially harmful to children. The report claims that 'no trials have compared the advisability and safety of the U.S. vaccine schedule as compared to other nations,' and that 'the number of vaccinations on the American vaccine schedule exceeds the number of vaccinations on many European schedules.'
There has, in fact, been research done on the differences in vaccination schedules. Medical researchers determined decades ago that administering multiple vaccinations at a time, or within months of each other, is not inherently dangerous, and that vaccine regimens vary between nations because different countries deal with different disease prevalences, cost restrictions, and the general availability of medication.
Kennedy has claimed that the agencies under his authority will be separated from the — in his view — 'corrupt' practices of respected medical research institutions and publishers. Earlier this month, Kennedy said in an interview that the National Institute of Health would likely 'stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they're all corrupt.'
Instead, the nation's leading health agencies will apparently just make the studies up and hope no one notices.
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