With this in mind, no one was especially surprised when the White House report started crumbling under scrutiny. The Washington Post reported, “Some of the report’s suggestions ... stretched the limits of science, medical experts said. Several sections of the report offer misleading representations of findings in scientific papers.”

That was last week. This week, NOTUS advanced these concerns, reporting that the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report “misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.”

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. ... NOTUS also found serious issues with how the report interpreted some of the existing studies it cites.

For example, the administration’s document listed epidemiologist Katherine Keyes as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents — except she didn’t write it.

“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “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.”....

I would gladly make note of the defense of the MAHA document from Kennedy and the Department of Health and Human Services, but at least so far, neither the controversial secretary nor the Cabinet agency he ostensibly leads has commented on these new allegations. HHS did not respond to NOTUS' request for comment on the citation inconsistencies, the outlet reported.

Of course, given Kennedy’s recent track record, there’s no reason to assume he’d be able to answer questions about the document anyway.

To be sure, the traditional norms surrounding American politics have been largely shattered, but in a situation like this one, it’s worth emphasizing that in a normal and healthy political system, if officials released a much-hyped report on public health policy, and scrutiny found that the document relied on scientific sources that didn’t exist, those officials would be expected to resign — quickly.

Almost immediately after Donald Trump and his White House team unveiled “The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again” last week, problems emerged. The Washington Post reported, for example, that some of the report’s suggestions “stretched the limits of science,” and offered “misleading representations” of scientific research.

A week later, a devastating report published by NOTUS advanced the underlying story considerably, highlighting the unambiguous fact that the MAHA document “misinterprets some studies and cites others that don’t exist, according to the listed authors.” Soon after, The New York Times identified “additional faulty references” in the report. From the Times’ article:

The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues. But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.

While there’s been no official explanation for how, exactly, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team managed to release a much-hyped official document with fake citations, multiple reports noted the likely culprit. As The Washington Post reported, “Some of the citations ... appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.”

.....For example, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was pressed for some kind of explanation for the MAHA debacle. The president’s chief spokesperson responded by claiming there were “some formatting issues” with the document.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:iu4j537hox5huj4bwnwgub4z/post/3lqdc55klup2i

Link to tweet

.....Leavitt nevertheless added that the White House has “complete confidence” in Kennedy. She didn’t elaborate as to why, exactly, Kennedy remains in the president’s good graces, though it appears to have something to do with Trump’s indifference to whether the conspiracy theorist leading the Department of Health and Human Services gets things right or wrong.