The Imaginary Studies Cited In RFK Jr.'s 'MAHA' Report Were 'Formatting Errors,' Karoline Leavitt Helpfully Explains!
Robots dreaming of electric drug studies.
When Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released his “Make America Healthy Again” commission report on children’s health, there were a number of somewhat glaring omissions. For one, health insurance was not mentioned once, despite the fact that there are 4.4 million children in this country without it. The word “doctor” showed up a total of three times, all in the context of how they are supposedly being fooled by the bad medical journals that RFK Jr. wants to replace with his own. You know, the bad medical journals that just keep finding that vaccines are safe and effective? Nowhere is it mentioned that 10 percent of children (about 20 million) in the United States do not have a primary care doctor or regular source for healthcare.
There is also nothing in the report about access to affordable healthcare at all, despite the fact that at least one-third of GoFundMe campaigns are raising money for medical care and many of them are for children — like the hundreds and hundreds of campaigns to pay for treatments for pediatric cancer and other medical conditions that primarily affect children, like spinal muscular atrophy, leukemia, and metachromatic leukodystrophy.
Another thing they seem to have forgotten was to make sure that all of the studies cited in the report were real studies that people actually did in real life, rather than figments of someone’s (we’re going out on a limb and guessing “AI”) imagination.
A report published Wednesday on NOTUS found that — besides all the citations that claimed the opposite of what the studies found, which were numerous — seven of the studies cited in the MAHA report did not actually exist at all. It’s actually quite impressive when you think about it, as someone (AI) had to go to the trouble of making up the name of a study, deciding which medical journal to pretend it was from, and adding the names of various authors to it.
Via NOTUS:
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.”
There are many people out there who believe that the Mandela Effect — people “remembering” Nelson Mandela dying in prison despite that not happening, people believing The Berenstain Bears were, at some point, The Berenstein Bears — is proof of people somehow floating in and out of parallel universes where things are just slightly different. Perhaps that is what happened here. Perhaps these people did conduct these studies in an alternate universe … but probably not.
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. […]
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 addition to the seven entirely fictional studies, there were significant issues with dozens of others — broken links, wrong authors, wrong issue numbers and straight up mischaracterizations of author’s research and conclusions.
The White House has since responded to the report, blaming the fabricated studies and other problems on “formatting issues.”
“I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed, and the report will be updated,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in response to a question from NOTUS during a press briefing.
Do I not know what formatting issues are? Like, sure, broken links can be a formatting issue, something done on accident, but making up entire, non-existent studies with names and authors and everything? How would that be formatted correctly?
“But,” Leavitt continued, “it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that's ever been released by the federal government, and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.”
Well, if the authors of the report made up or mischaracterized studies to make their point, it really does kind of “negate the substance of the report.” It is not, in fact, based on good science. It is based on the gut feelings of people like RFK Jr. and “wellness influencer” Calley Means, who helped coordinate the report and is the brother of Trump’s wackjob Surgeon General nominee, Casey Means — and who, by the way, has no actual medical or scientific background.
But all is well! They have “fixed” the report!
As noted this morning at The Bulwark:
To understand exactly how ridiculous these defenses are, it’s helpful to dig into one of the passages in question. Here’s how the initial MAHA report made the argument that pharmaceutical ad campaigns are distorting drug prescription rates for American children [Wonkette is bolding the following to denote the Bulwark’s blockquote within our blockquote]:
While many more studies exist on drugs used by adults, two specific studies on children are broadly illustrative of the problem :
Direct to Consumer (DTC) advertising for ADHD drugs in children were found to use vague symptom lists including typical childhood behaviors; the ads led parents to overestimate ADHD prevalence and to request ADHD drugs inappropriately.
Similarly, DTC advertising for antidepressants in teenagers were found to employ vague symptom lists that overlap with typical adolescent behaviors; this was also associated with inappropriate parental requests for antidepressants.
Both of these bullets pointed to studies that never existed. Once that awkward little fact was brought to light, the report was updated to read as follows (emphasis mine):
While many more studies exist on drugs used by adults, the impact of Direct to Consumer (DTC) advertising on children is also highly concerning:
DTC advertising for ADHD drugs in children have been suggested to use vague symptom lists including typical childhood behaviors, potentially leading parents to overestimate ADHD prevalence and to request ADHD drugs inappropriately.
Similarly, DTC advertising is believed to encourage greater use of psychotropic medications in adolescents, including antianxiety, antipsychotic, and antidepressant classes.
See? That is just completely fixed!
Quite frankly, given the report’s negative characterization of peer-reviewed studies and Kennedy’s claim that scientific journals like the ones that did not actually publish the studies cited in his report are all “corrupt,” I don’t know why they bothered citing any studies at all. Why not just cite the Facebook posts of random people who think vaccines are bad and all of the children are overmedicated, spend too much time on their phones and don’t play outside enough anymore?
Whatever any studies say, Kennedy’s conclusions will remain the same. There is no evidence on earth that can convince him otherwise, and he will keep trying until someone tells him what he wants to hear.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
As someone who has either edited, co-authored, or authored quite a few studies that have gone through the peer review process, I can confidently say that the MAHA Report would've received a flat-out REJECT from any reputable scientific journal. Hell, as badly cited as this thing is, it would've probably gotten a chilly reception at the pay-to-play journals also too.
That's probably why RFKJr is calling academic journals "corrupt," because they don't mess around with this kind of egregious lying skullduggery.
Let's just go back to the four humors and skip all this dithering...