The United States(US) government has announced plans to amend a flagship report on children’s health due to concerns over cited non-existent studies. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the citation errors were attributed to “formatting issues” and would be updated.
The report, compiled by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission, found that processed food, chemicals, stress, and the overprescription of medications and vaccines could be factors behind chronic illness in children, citing over 500 studies.
However, an investigation by digital news outlet NOTUS revealed that seven studies referenced in the report did not exist, while there were also broken links and “misstated conclusions.” Leavitt insisted that the problems do “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.”
The issues with the report have raised concerns over the credibility of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was appointed by President Donald Trump. Kennedy’s approval as health secretary in February stirred significant controversy due to his history of sowing doubt about the safety of vaccines. Since taking the role, he has fired thousands of workers at federal health agencies and cut billions of dollars from biomedical research spending.
The Democratic National Committee slammed the report as “rife with misinformation,” accusing Kennedy’s agency of “justifying its policy priorities with studies and sources that do not exist.” Authors credited with producing some of the studies said that they were not part of the research or that the studies did not exist.
For instance, Noah Kreski, a Columbia University researcher, stated that a paper on adolescent anxiety and depression during COVID-19 “doesn’t appear to be a study that exists at all.”
Despite the controversy, the Department of Health and Human Services maintained that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same – a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”