ABC News has confirmed that some of the studies cited in the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” report do not exist.
Dr. Katherine Keyes, a researcher cited in the report as a first author of a paper on depression and anxiety rates among teens during the pandemic, told ABC News that she did not write the paper cited in the report released last week by the White House’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“I was surprised to see what seems to be an error in the citation of my work in the report, and it does make me concerned given that citation practices are an important part of conducting and reporting rigorous science,” Keyes told ABC News via email.
Keyes is cited in a paper titled “Changes in mental health and substance use among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic,” which appears on page 52 of the MAHA report and is published by JAMA Pediatrics. A representative from the journal confirmed to ABC News that the paper does not exist.
Keyes stated that she has conducted research on the topic discussed in the MAHA report, but that she and her listed co-authors did not write the paper cited. “I would be happy to send this information to the MAHA committee to correct the report, although I have not yet received information on where to reach them,” she told me.
At least two research journals, the American Academy of Pediatrics and JAMA Pediatrics, one of the American Medical Association’s journals, have confirmed to ABC News that they were unable to locate certain papers from the MAHA report in their publications, despite being cited as such.
The news was first published in NOTUS.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday that the errors were due to “formatting issues,” which were being corrected and “the report will be updated.”
She stated that the citation issues did not “negate the substance of the report.”
Leavitt also stated that the administration had “complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS.”
Calley Means, Kennedy’s senior adviser who helped coordinate the report, defended it, saying the “underlying data and conclusions are correct” and “any formatting errors have been corrected.”
An updated version did remove references to at least some non-existent reports, replacing them with other sources. The new version also appeared to soften some of the language to accommodate the citation changes.
For example, a section on direct-to-consumer advertisements claimed that the ads “led parents to overestimate ADHD prevalence and to request ADHD drugs inappropriately.” The updated version states that the advertisements “potentially” have that impact.
“Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains unchanged — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to better understand the chronic disease epidemic that affects our country’s children. “Under President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, our federal government is no longer ignoring this crisis, and it is time for the media to do the same,” HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement.
All of this comes as Kennedy has stated that he intends to direct federal researchers to stop publishing their work in independent, peer-reviewed journals, instead urging the National Institutes of Health to establish its own research journals.
“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” Kenned stated on the “Ultimate Human” podcast earlier this week.
The MAHA report, led by Kennedy, includes over 500 citations, the majority of which come from studies published in peer-reviewed, independent journals. The report cited studies from JAMA, the American Medical Association’s top-tier journal, 30 times.
Authors in peer-reviewed research are expected to use citations when referencing science from another source. It also serves as a road map for the research process and is frequently used to justify or support the importance of research.
Peer-reviewed journals typically use a DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, to identify a paper and provide it with a permanent web address.
Some of the papers listed in the MAHA report, including the nonexistent study involving Dr. Keyes, return a DOI not found error.