After Donald Trump and his White House team unveiled “The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again” last week, The New York Times noted, “The document echoes talking points Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has championed for decades.”
That was among the obvious red flags surrounding the report. Kennedy is, after all, notorious for pushing unscientific conspiracy theories and claiming, among other things, that Wi-Fi causes “leaky brain.” Any document reflecting his ideas related to health care policy should reflexively be treated with skepticism.
With this in mind, no one was especially surprised when the White House report started crumbling under scrutiny. The Washington Post reported, “Some of the report’s suggestions … stretched the limits of science, medical experts said. Several sections of the report offer misleading representations of findings in scientific papers.”
That was last week. This week, NOTUS advanced these concerns, reporting that the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report “misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.”
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions. Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all. … NOTUS also found serious issues with how the report interpreted some of the existing studies it cites.
For example, the administration’s document listed epidemiologist Katherine Keyes as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents — except she didn’t write it.
“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.”
NOTUS’ report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added, “As the Trump administration cuts research funding for federal health agencies and academic institutions and rejects the scientific consensus on issues like vaccines and gender-affirming care, the issues with its much-heralded MAHA report could indicate lessening concern for scientific accuracy at the highest levels of the federal government.”
Yes. Yes, it could. I would gladly make note of the defense of the MAHA document from Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services, but at least so far, neither the controversial secretary nor the Cabinet agency he ostensibly leads has commented on these new allegations. HHS did not respond to NOTUS’ request for comment on the citation inconsistencies, the outlet reported. Of course, given Kennedy’s recent track record, there’s no reason to assume he’d be able to answer questions about the document anyway. To be sure, the traditional norms surrounding American politics have been largely shattered, but in a situation like this one, it’s worth emphasizing that in a normal and healthy political system, if officials released a much-hyped report on public health policy, and scrutiny found that the document relied on scientific sources that didn’t exist, those officials would be expected to resign — quickly.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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