We recently talked about Donald Trump's foray into medicine when he declared, sans any actual evidence of course, that autism cannot possibly be caused by anything other than some external source. It was an admittedly odd stance to take for someone who seems to care so deeply about genetics in other areas, but Donald Trump being an inconsistent mess is not remotely newsworthy. The comments were made during a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) event that unveiled RFK Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" MAHA report on American health. That report, which RFK Jr. touted as a result of "gold standard" science, identified four major causes of deficiencies in health in America.
The MAHA Commission event unveiled the group's new report, which pointed to four key factors it says are hurting U.S. children: ultraprocessed foods, environmental chemicals, digital behavior and "overmedicalization." The report identifies pesticides and other chemicals as potentially having harmful health impacts, but it stops short of recommending actions to limit them.
And, hey, I can get on board with some of that. Though I've made a habit of righteously slapping around Kennedy and his HHS Department as of late, not every idea the man has is completely stupid. Do ultra-processed foods probably suck for our health? I can imagine that being the case. Chemicals in our environment and/or food? Sure, that sounds like something worth studying. Digital behavior issues and the vague reference to "overmedicalization" have my spidey-sense tingling, I will admit, but neither strike me as particularly unworthy of attention at first glance.
But the problem is that when you tout your report as "gold standard" medicine and then I later learn that this report's citations read like an AI hallucination, well, now I have to question everything once more.
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.
The post over at NOTUS goes into details. The broken links are probably just a result of human error, I suppose. The misinterpretations of other studies could be the result of, well, flat incompetence. But the studies and citations within specific papers and journals that don't appear to exist? Someone is either flat out lying in this report, or else it was constructed with the help of AI. It's not like we haven't seen that sort of thing in the academic and legal realms before.
Katherine Keyes is one author of a supposed study the MAHA report referenced.
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.
Again, I cannot say for sure that AI was used in this report, but it has all the hallmarks of your typical AI hallucination, where it attempts to build a plausible response to a prompt based on whatever datapoints it can find on the internet. For instance, Keyes does study topics such as in the fictional citation. And Keyes has in fact published work within JAMA Pediatrics. But the specifics here appear to be completely fabricated.
She's not alone.
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.
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.
There is more, with cited authors confirming to NOTUS that they never authored the studies or articles in other citations. In other cases, the report simply takes small, targeted studies and broadens them to become nationwide evidence of the very theories Kennedy has been pushing for years and years.
Can we confirm for sure that someone, or multiple someones, used generative AI to produce this report? No, we can't, but I say that with as much of a literary wink as I can muster through the written word.
But even if that ends up not being the case, a report full of fictionalized and misinterpreted scientific studies is many things, but it sure as shit is not "gold standard science."