The U.S. government was forced this week to revise a flagship health report on childhood illness after multiple researchers cited in the original document said they had never written the studies attributed to them—or that those studies simply do not exist.

The report, titled “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA), was released on May 22 by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alongside a presidential commission investigating chronic childhood diseases. But in the days that followed, at least four scientists told AFP that the articles bearing their names were either fabricated or could not be found in any recognized scientific archive.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt initially dismissed the issue as a matter of “formatting errors,” but promised the report would be corrected. She defended Kennedy Jr.—a known vaccine skeptic—saying his team’s work is “backed by good science.”

Fake citations and broken links

Noah Kreski, a researcher at Columbia University, was one of the first to refute authorship of a cited study on adolescent anxiety and depression during the pandemic. “The citation isn’t mine and doesn’t appear to match any real study,” he told AFP.

The alleged link to the study led to a broken page on JAMA Pediatrics. The journal’s spokesperson confirmed that no such article was ever published, either there or elsewhere in the JAMA Network.

Columbia epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, also listed as a co-author, said she had no idea where the statistics attributed to her came from and confirmed she “did not write” the article.

Another Columbia professor, Guohua Li, said the reference to his name was “completely fabricated” and added that he doesn’t even know Kreski.

The AFP also contacted Harold Farber, a pediatric professor at Baylor College of Medicine, who said the paper attributed to him “does not exist” and that he has never collaborated with the co-authors listed.

Similarly, Brian McNeill, spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University, confirmed that professor Robert Findling is not the author of a study the report credits to him regarding psychotropic drug advertising for youth.

A fourth article about ADHD medication, supposedly published in Pediatrics in 2008, also does not exist, according to Alex Hulvalchick of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which publishes the journal.

Quiet edits, no clear answers

Under mounting scrutiny, the White House issued an updated version of the report with corrected references. In all but one case, fake studies were replaced by real sources. In one instance, the fabricated research was swapped for an article from The New York Times.

Still, no explanation has been given about how the original citations were created, or whether artificial intelligence tools were used in the process. Leavitt referred those questions to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which declined to comment.

In a public statement, the Democratic National Committee slammed the report as “riddled with disinformation.”

Despite warnings from the medical community, Kennedy was confirmed as Health Secretary. Since taking office, he has instructed the National Institutes of Health to investigate the causes of autism—a condition he has long tried to link to the MMR vaccine, a theory widely debunked by scientific studies.

He has also voiced criticism over the growing use of psychiatric drugs and antibiotics in children.

With information from AFP