By Jim Geraghty
Friday, May 30, 2025
I was never a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The guy with brain worms who dumps baby bear carcasses and decapitates whales always seemed like an odd fit at best at
the Department of Health and Human Services and a potentially catastrophic one
at worst. It was not reassuring when Kennedy strode into his confirmation
hearing and made clear that he didn’t know which one was Medicaid and which one was Medicare.
(Those programs make up 85 percent of the budget at HHS.) Nor was it comforting
when Kennedy assured Dr. Phil McGraw and his audience that he
thinks the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is behind the
phenomenon of “contrails” and that “I’m going to do everything in my power to
stop it.”
But President Trump picked him for the job, and 52 Senate
Republicans voted to confirm him, and so the country is stuck with him, at
least for the time being.
On May 16, the Department of Health and Human Services
unveiled “The MAHA Report,” and a few days later, in a ceremony with President Trump standing beside him, Kennedy
boasted, “This is a milestone. There’s — never in American history has the
federal government taken a position on public health like this. . . . It’s not
just one cabinet secretary, it’s the entire government that is behind this
report.”
The introduction to the report described it as “a call to
action. It presents the stark reality of American children’s declining health,
backed by compelling data and long-term trends.” The report promised to
“analyze the evidence, spotlight gaps, and map the terrain — laying the
groundwork for coordinated, high-impact solutions.”
The first big problem is that some chunks of that report
are completely made up.
Credit Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto of NOTUS — “News of
the United States”– for the scoop:
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.
Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is
listed in the MAHA report as the first author of a study on anxiety in
adolescents. When NOTUS reached out to her this week, she was surprised to hear
of the citation. She does study mental health and substance use, she said. But she didn’t write the paper
listed.
“The paper cited is not a real
paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS via email.
“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.”
It’s not clear that anyone wrote
the study cited in the MAHA report. The citation refers to a study titled,
“Changes in mental health and substance abuse among US adolescents during the
COVID-19 pandemic,” along with a nonfunctional link to the study’s digital
object identifier. While the citation claims that the study appeared in the
12th issue of the 176th edition of the journal JAMA Pediatrics, that issue
didn’t include a study with that title.
Citing studies that don’t exist is the most serious
problem, but the report also apparently blatantly mischaracterizes the findings
of other studies:
In one section about mental health
medication, which Kennedy has railed against for years, the report cites a review paper it claims shows
that therapy alone is as or more effective than psychiatric medicine. But one
of that paper’s statisticians told NOTUS that conclusion doesn’t make sense,
given their study didn’t even attempt to measure or compare therapy’s
effectiveness as a mental health treatment.
“We did not include psychotherapy
in our review. We only compared the effectiveness of (new generation)
antidepressants against each other, and against placebo,” Joanne McKenzie, a
biostatistics professor at an Australian university, said in an email.
Another paper, which the report
says shows “antipsychotic prescriptions for children increased by 800 percent
between 1993 and 2009,” actually found an eight-fold increase from 1995 to 2005.
The moment you read “sources don’t appear to exist at
all,” you probably started to wonder if this highly touted HHS report had been
written in part by some artificial-intelligence program. No one has proven the
department’s MAHA report was written in part by an AI, but it fits the pattern
of past examples. AI programs sometimes “hallucinate” facts. Recently, King
Features, a Hearst syndicate that licenses content nationally, published a summer reading list tucked into a special
section of the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. But
the list recommended books that didn’t exist and included quotes from
unidentifiable experts; the writer later admitted the “list was partially
generated by artificial intelligence.”
Or you may recall that during the controversy surrounding Joe Biden pardoning his son
Hunter, Charles Pierce of Esquire magazine justified Biden’s act by
pointing to former President George H. W. Bush’s pardon of his son Neil, and
Ana Navarro of The View cited Woodrow Wilson’s pardon of his
brother-in-law Hunter deButts. Both writers, allegedly among the intellectual
heavyweights of modern progressivism, outsourced their thinking to AI and
referred to events that didn’t happen.
Hunter deButts.
Here’s how White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt spun it
Thursday: “We have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at
HHS. I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that
are being addressed, and the report will be updated, but it does not negate the
substance of the report.”
“Formatting issues.” No, this isn’t a matter of “format.”
This is a matter of some of the studies in there being made up, and other
studies being completely misinterpreted.
The whole Make America Healthy Again movement and
philosophy is — allegedly — Kennedy’s passion and life’s work. Supposedly, this
is what he cares about, more than anything else. This is why he got the job.
If Kennedy and his team couldn’t put much effort into
writing it, why should anyone put much effort into reading it? And why should
anybody make any decision related to anybody’s health based on it?
If the Secretary of Health and Human Services doesn’t
care about what’s in his own “milestone” report on his signature issues in his
agenda . . . why should anyone else?
I
said it somewhat tongue-in-cheek yesterday, but I’m saying it genuinely
now: The most disappointing aspect of all this is how lazy everyone turned out
to be.
Wait, it gets even better. Two days ago, Kennedy
appeared on a podcast, Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka, and lamented
how unreliable medical studies and medical journals are.
“We’re going to devote probably 20 percent of NIH’s
budget to replication. Every study has to be replicated. We’re going to publish
the peer review for the first time. We’re probably going to stop publishing in
the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and
those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” Kennedy said.
Got that? The guy who just published a big report that
had a bunch of nonexistent studies is telling you that you shouldn’t trust all
the rest of the big medical journals, because they’re all “corrupt.”
Even if you’re a true believer in Kennedy, at least let
the scales fall from your eyes long enough to acknowledge that he makes life so
much easier for his critics when he and his team churn out a report full of
AI-generated slop instead of actual, citable, verifiable research. Nobody has
to put much effort into discrediting Kennedy; he discredits himself.
ADDENDUM: Hey, remember yesterday’s newsletter about the court striking down most of
Trump’s tariffs? Never mind. “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal
Circuit paused the Court of International Trade’s decision from one day earlier
that blocked Trump’s sweeping worldwide tariff package and other tariffs he has
imposed since his term began.”
So, are judges good again for Trump fans? Not such a coup
anymore?
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