President Donald Trump held an event at the White House last week to announce the release of something called the MAHA Report, a product of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new commission that’s supposed to “Make America Healthy Again.” But if you weren’t already skeptical of the report’s findings, an article from the nonprofit news outlet NOTUS should give you pause. Several of the studies cited in the report don’t even exist.
NOTUS reporters spent five days combing through the 522 citations in the report. They found dozens of broken links and studies with missing or incorrect authors. There were also issues with citations having the wrong issue numbers for the journals they appeared in, according to NOTUS.
But the most damning instances were at least seven studies that simply didn’t exist. For instance, the MAHA Report claims that drug advertising has led to a rise in ADHD and depression prescriptions being written for children. But try to find the study that’s cited in the report for that claim: Findling, R. L., et al. (2009). Direct-to-consumer advertising of psychotropic medications for youth: A growing concern. Journal of Child and Adolescent Pyschopharmacology19(5), 487-492.
You can’t find that study because it doesn’t exist. Not in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacologyor anywhere else. The supposed author of that report, Robert L. Findling, is a real person and currently teaches at the Virginia Commonwealth University. But a spokesperson for that school told NOTUS he didn’t author any such study.
The MAHA Report also tries to claim that 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed, citing a 2017 paper titled, “Overprescribing of Corticosteroids for Children with Asthma.” Again, the paper doesn’t exist.
NOTUS has other examples of fake studies it found, but even the real studies cited have issues. The report references a paper published in the journal Pediatrics that referred to how screen time impacted sleep in children. The paper was realm but it wasn’t in Pediatrics and it didn’t actually study children—it looked at adults. The report appears to be littered with errors like that.
The White House responded to questions about the fake studies when asked about what NOTUS had found during a regular press briefing Thursday. In typically evasive fashion, press secretary Karoline Leavitt referred to any errors as “formatting issues” and said those were being addressed and the report would be “updated.”
“I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed in the report will be updated, but it does not negate the substance of the report, which as you know is 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 said.
Leavitt was asked whether reports like this are created using artificial intelligence tools, and the press secretary told the journalist she “can’t speak to that” and would “defer [sic] you to the Department of Health and Human Services.”
And while it’s unclear whether the MAHA Report really was created with the help of AI, it wouldn’t be surprising. The White House has been a big booster of AI, touting investments in data centers by companies like OpenAI and Oracle. But generative AI is known to frequently just make things up, including entire books or studies when asked for a list. A freelance writer for the Chicago Sun-Times recently used AI to create a list of new books everyone should be excited for this summer. Ten of the 15 books on the list simply don’t exist, though many of the authors named were real.
The problem, of course, is that anyone using AI to create lists or citations needs to actually check to see if those things are real. And when you have to do that kind of research to fact-check your robotic tool, it can start to become more work than just doing the research yourself using existing tools like Google Scholar.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a dangerously fringe antivax figure who suggested in a 2021 book that he doesn’t even believe in germ theory. But this is the guy who’s overseeing a complete overhaul of the U.S. public health system, and it seems like nothing—not even a scandal showing his first hallmark report to be fraudulent—will unseat him from his position of power over our lives.
