'Not a real paper': Scientists say Make America Healthy Again report cites nonexistent sources
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s
“Make America Healthy Again” Commission
report is filled with errors and broken links,
reports NOTUS. The paper, released under the administration of President Donald Trump, also cites seven sources that do not appear to exist.
NOTUS spoke to Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, the MAHA report lists as the first author of a study on adolescent anxiety. Only Keyes claims she didn’t write the paper the report uses.
“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.”
NOTUS reports it could not confirm is anyone wrote the study “Changes in mental health and substance abuse among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic,” complete with a nonfunctional link to the study’s digital object identifier. The citation claims the study appeared in the 12th issue of the 176th edition of the journal JAMA Pediatrics, but that
issue doesn’t include a report with that title.
Similarly, NOTUS reports two other studies pertaining to direct-to-consumer drug advertisements for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids appears nowhere “to be found.”
NOTUS included these 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,” write NOTUS reporters Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto. “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, according to a Google Scholar profile.
In another section titled, “American Children are on Too Much Medicine – A Recent and Emerging Crisis,” the report claims 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. But searching Google for the exact title of the paper that section cites to buttress that figure — “Overprescribing of oral corticosteroids for children with asthma” — leads to only one result: the MAHA report itself. The corticosteroids study’s alleged author, pediatric pulmonologist Harold J. Farber, denied writing it to NOTUS, or working with other authors listed in the study. He also described the MAHA report’s conclusions are “clearly an overgeneralization” of 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 told NOTUS in an email.
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