Par for the course
The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist
The Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.
By Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto
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.
pidemiologist 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.”
More on the MAHA Report
• The MAHA Report Has Been Updated to Replace Citations That Didn’t Exist
• Democrats Say MAHA Report Inconsistencies Show Kennedy Isn’t Fit to Lead HHS
• The White House Blames ‘Formatting Issues’ for the MAHA Report’s Citation Problems
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.
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.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on the report’s citation inconsistencies prior to publication of this story.
The anxiety study wasn’t the only one the report cites that appears to be mysteriously absent from the scientific literature. A section describing the “corporate capture of media” highlights two studies that it says are “broadly illustrative” of how a rise in direct-to-consumer drug advertisements has led to more prescriptions being written for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids.
The catch? Neither of those studies is anywhere to be found. Here are the two citations:
Shah, M. B., et al. (2008). Direct-to-consumer advertising and the rise in ADHD medication use among children.
Pediatrics, 122(5), e1055- e1060.
Findling, R. L., et al. (2009). Direct-to-consumer advertising of psychotropic medications for youth: A growing concern.
Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, 19(5), 487-492.
Those articles don’t appear in the table of contents for the journals listed in their citations. A spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University, where
psychiatric researcher Robert L. Findling currently teaches, confirmed to NOTUS that he never authored such an article. The author of the first study doesn’t appear to be a real ADHD researcher at all — at least, not one with a Google Scholar profile.
In another section titled, “American Children are on Too Much Medicine – A Recent and Emerging Crisis,” the report claims that 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. But searching Google for the exact title of the paper it cites to back up that figure — “Overprescribing of oral corticosteroids for children with asthma” — leads to only one result: the MAHA report.
The corticosteroids study’s supposed first author, pediatric pulmonologist Harold J. Farber, denied writing it or ever working with the other listed authors. He pointed to
similar research he’s conducted, but said that even if the MAHA report cited that study correctly, its conclusions are “clearly an overgeneralization” of the findings.
“It is a tremendous leap of faith to generalize from a study in one Medicaid managed care program in Texas using 2011 to 2015 data to national care patterns in 2025,” Farber said in an email.
Spread across the footnotes of the 73-page document, those missing papers are listed alongside dozens of citations with more mundane errors like broken links, missing or incorrect authors and wrong issue numbers.
NOTUS also found serious issues with how the report interpreted some of the existing studies it cites.
CONTINUED
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