RFK Jr.’s MAHA Report Is ‘Rife With Errors’ — Including at Least Seven Fake Sources

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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” report was found to have cited at least seven sources that don’t actually exist.

The “MAHA Report” was published earlier this week from the newly-established Make America Healthy Again Commission. In it, more than 500 sources were used to detail supposed issues within the U.S.’s health system.

According to a Thursday piece from NOTUS, however, the MAHA Report cited multiple studies that don’t appear to be real.

For one example:

Epidemiologist 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.”

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.

In a section of the report that examined the “rise in direct-to-consumer drug advertisements” that “has led to more prescriptions being written for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids,” a study conducted by psychiatric researcher Robert L. Findling was cited. At the time of writing, Findling was a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. A university spokesperson confirmed Findling had never authored the report listed.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to NOTUS’s request for comment.