If you’re just tuning in, the scandal du jour is that the long awaited and highly touted Make America Healthy Again report, is an exercise in incompetence. And I mean the kind of incompetence, that if a law student submitted something this screwed up for a law review paper, that person would be having a serious conversation with the Dean about staying in school. This level of blatant incompetence and shoddiness would have a law student headed out the door — but it’s just fine for a cabinet member in the year 2025.
The most incompetent, dishonest admin in US history. One bumbling fool and liar after another. https://t.co/UPU9mbWiTf
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 29, 2025
“Formatting issues?” BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! OMFG. Leavitt has managed to hit a new bottom. And not her last.
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.
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.
As the Trump administration cuts research funding for federal health agencies and academic institutions and rejects the scientific consensus on issues like vaccines and gender-affirming care, the issues with its much-heralded MAHA report could indicate lessening concern for scientific accuracy at the highest levels of the federal government.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on the report’s citation inconsistencies.
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. Here are the 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. 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.
This is a scandal that makes Watergate look tame by comparison but it won’t get that much press. Why? Because we are numb. Scandal and incompetence has become the new normal. You can’t run anything effectively like this. You can’t run a school or a business with this level of shoddiness and incompetence, yet the federal government is now being *run* this way.
Spread across the footnotes of the 73-page document, those missing papers are listed alongside dozens of citations with more mundane errors like broken links, missing or incorrect authors and wrong issue numbers.
NOTUS also found serious issues with how the report interpreted some of the existing studies it cites.
In one section about mental health medication, which Kennedy has railed against for years, the report cites a review paper it claims shows that therapy alone is as or more effective than psychiatric medicine. But one of that paper’s statisticians told NOTUS that conclusion doesn’t make sense, given their study didn’t even attempt to measure or compare therapy’s effectiveness as a mental health treatment.
“We did not include psychotherapy in our review. We only compared the effectiveness of (new generation) antidepressants against each other, and against placebo,” Joanne McKenzie, a biostatistics professor at an Australian university, said in an email.
This is grand slam professional malpractice. It is medical malpractice, it is psychotherapy malpractice, it is absolutely governmental malpractice — but it will not explode like Vesuvius, as it should. Kennedy should be out of a job. But you heard what Leavitt said: the MAHA report is a work of genius.
We can only live in this gaslighted reality for so long. How many people need to die from Kennedy’s incompetence? Because that’s the direction this is going. Make no mistake.
And do you want to hear what Kennedy has to say about his opus? “Never in American history has the federal government taken a position on public health like this,” Kennedy wrote. Thank God for that. Many of us would not be here now, dead from polio, measles, smallpox, God only knows what.
Who the hell does RFK’s bidding on this kind of bullshit dis-management? He doesn’t sit down and write this stuff, so who does it for him? How many liars and bullshit artists does he have in his department, and where are the competent people who populated it before him? I simply cannot comprehend how this kind of insanity has become the modus operandi of the American government and how Congress, that allegedly august body who exist to protect we the citizens, can sit on its collective ass and do nothing to save us. I see a real revolution looming, and it won’t be a peaceful one …
American fascists are the most creative at murder.