By Matt Novak
President Donald Trump held an event at the White House last week to announce the release of something called the MAHA Report, a product of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new commission that’s supposed to “Make America Healthy Again.” But if you weren’t already skeptical of the report’s findings, an article from the nonprofit news outlet NOTUS should give you pause. Several of the studies cited in the report don’t even exist.
NOTUS reporters spent five days combing through the 522 citations in the report. They found dozens of broken links and studies with missing or incorrect authors. There were also issues with citations having the wrong issue numbers for the journals they appeared in, according to NOTUS.
But the most damning instances were at least seven studies that simply didn’t exist. For instance, the MAHA Report claims that drug advertising has led to a rise in ADHD and depression prescriptions being written for children. But try to find the study that’s cited in the report for that claim: Findling, R. L., et al. (2009). Direct-to-consumer advertising of psychotropic medications for youth: A growing concern. Journal of Child and Adolescent Pyschopharmacology, 19(5), 487-492.
You can’t find that study because it doesn’t exist. Not in the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, or anywhere else. The supposed author of that report, Robert L. Findling, is a real person and currently teaches at the Virginia Commonwealth University. But a spokesperson for that school told NOTUS he didn’t author any such study.
The MAHA Report also tries to claim that 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed, citing a 2017 paper titled, “Overprescribing of Corticosteroids for Children with Asthma.” Again, the paper doesn’t exist.
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