MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
When President Trump established the Make America Healthy Again Commission back in February, he gave it marching orders. Trump said that within 100 days, he wanted to see a Make Our Children Healthy Again assessment. Well, this month, a team headed up by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered, releasing a 73-page report that opens by saying, the health of American children is in crisis. The pages that follow catalog many reasons why, and the authors cite more than 500 references to back up their claims. Only problem is, some of the scientific papers that the report cites do not exist. Margaret Manto and Emily Kennard with the nonprofit news site NOTUS - that's short for News Of The United States - they broke the story, and Margaret Manto is here now. Welcome.
MARGARET MANTO: Hi, thanks for having me.
KELLY: How did you first realize there was something off about these journal citations?
MANTO: I got a tip Saturday morning that there was maybe something going on with the citations in the report, and I started looking through them right away, you know, just kind of haphazardly on my computer. But after I looked at just a couple, I realized, like, oh, I'm going to have to look at every single one of these because it was pretty obvious pretty quickly that there were there were at least some issues.
KELLY: Yeah. I mean, among the issues, you spoke with researchers whose names were attached to some of the studies being cited. Tell me what Katherine Keyes told you.
MANTO: So epidemiologist Katherine Keyes was listed in the report as the first author of a study on anxiety and adolescence during the pandemic. But when we reached out to her, she had never heard of this paper because she didn't write it. So she told us that she had never done research on that topic and that she'd never worked with the other authors listed on the paper and that it didn't appear to be a real paper.
KELLY: Didn't appear to be a real paper - I mean, is it clear who did write it? Is it clear that anyone wrote the paper?
MANTO: So when we tried to find the paper listed online, we weren't able to find it anywhere. So yeah, that plus what Keyes said made us pretty confident that it just wasn't a real paper.
KELLY: Have you been able to nail down how these errors happened, how they all got in there?
MANTO: We don't know at this point. I know that there has been some really great follow-up reporting in The Washington Post, looking at markers for AI. And so they found that there were some links that included a signifier that the link was generated using AI, and that's something that a lot of people have hypothesized could be going on here. But that's one of the possibilities that we're looking into still.
KELLY: What does Health and Human Services say about all this?
MANTO: They were very confident still in the substance of the report. They didn't answer any direct questions about what kind of tools were maybe used to generate it, if they used any AI tools. But yeah, they really focused on the body of the report and made it pretty clear that they didn't feel like the kinds of formatting issues - as they called these missing citations - didn't change the substance of the report, in their opinion.
KELLY: So what's your takeaway from this? What are the implications of problems like this in a make our children healthy again assessment?
MANTO: I think most scientists, all scientists, will agree that citations are not the most enjoyable part of research, but they are really critical when it comes to establishing your scientific credibility. And, you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his MAHA movement are really fighting an uphill battle right now, trying to establish themselves as the scientific leadership for the country, and a report like this, with these kinds of issues, I think, will not help them in that regard.
KELLY: Margaret Manto is a reporter with NOTUS. Her piece is titled "The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don't Exist." Margaret, thank you.
MANTO: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
