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.

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.

The corticosteroids study’s supposed first author, pediatric pulmonologist Harold J. Farber, denied writing it or ever working with the other listed authors. He pointed to similar research he’s conducted, but said that even if the MAHA report cited that study correctly, its conclusions are “clearly an overgeneralization” of the findings.

“It is a tremendous leap of faith to generalize from a study in one Medicaid managed care program in Texas using 2011 to 2015 data to national care patterns in 2025,” Farber said in an email.

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.

Another paper, which the report says shows “antipsychotic prescriptions for children increased by 800% between 1993 and 2009,” actually found an eight-fold increase from 1995 to 2005.

Another medical researcher whose work was cited in a section about how screen time affects children’s sleep told us the MAHA report mischaracterized her study.

“The conclusions in the report are not accurate and the journal reference is incorrect. It was not published in Pediatrics. Also, the study was not done in children, but in college students,” Mariana G. Figueiro emailed NOTUS. She added that she even had more relevant research the authors could have used: “I was not aware of the choice, or else I would have suggested one of the other ones.”

The Trump administration commissioned the report to investigate the root causes of chronic illnesses in the U.S. From exposure to pesticides and microplastics to cell phone radiation and food coloring, the report points to many potential culprits — and claims it offers “a clear, evidence-based foundation for the policy interventions, institutional reforms, and societal shifts needed to reverse course.” The commission is also scheduled to release a “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy” report in August.

Kennedy has enthusiastically promoted the report, calling it a “milestone” in a post on X after its release.

“Never in American history has the federal government taken a position on public health like this,” Kennedy wrote.

—
Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.

Have tips? You can reach Margaret on Signal at margaretmanto.61 and Emily at emilykennard.24.