Nonprofit news outlet NOTUS revealed in an article on Thursday that The MAHA Report released last week<\/a> includes several phony citations and appears to have been influenced by the writing of a generated AI platform like ChatGPT.<\/p>\n The report from Robert F. Kennedy\u2019s MAHA Commission was highly critical of agricultural pesticides and leaned into the belief that these products contribute to a host of chronic childhood diseases. Ag stakeholders overwhelmingly pushed back against the findings and highlighted the sustainability impacts \u2014 both financial and environmental \u2014 of restricting the use of scientifically tested pesticides.<\/p>\n The report also addressed other areas of chronic illness in America\u2019s youth, something that Kennedy has said is a longtime mission of his (he was a major player, for example, at the anti-vaccine Children\u2019s Health Defense organization).<\/p>\n However, the reporting from NOTUS<\/a> cast an embarrassing cloud over Kennedy and his MAHA report, which was subtitled, Making Our Children Healthy Again<\/em>. NOTUS said that, after talking to the authors listed in the studies the report cited, it found at least seven references that appear to be entirely fabricated to fit Kennedy\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n In one case, epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is listed in The MAHA Report as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. While she does study mental health and substance use in teens, she said she didn\u2019t write the paper listed. And she wasn\u2019t even aware that she was referenced in the report.<\/p>\n \u201cThe paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,\u201d Keyes told NOTUS via email. \u201cWe\u2019ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics<\/em> on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.\u201d<\/p>\n The citation refers to a study titled, Changes in mental health and substance abuse among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic<\/em>, along with a nonfunctional link to the study\u2019s digital object identifier. While the citation claims that the study appeared in the 12th issue of the 176th edition of the journal JAMA Pediatrics<\/em>, that issue didn\u2019t include a study with that title.<\/p>\n And it doesn\u2019t seem to be a simple case of the wrong journal accidentally being listed \u2014 that study doesn\u2019t actually appear to exist anywhere and is now believed to have been entirely made up.<\/p>\n NOTUS goes down a list of other citations that it couldn\u2019t track down either. Couple that with The MAHA Report\u2019s reliance on many outdated or tangential studies \u2014 like, on page 38, where it cites a 1982 study on insecticide residues in breast milk, despite the fact that most of the chemicals referenced have been banned or strictly regulated in the more than four decades since \u2014 there have been significant questions about the credibility and the processes used in creating the 68-page document.<\/p>\n Another study author, Mariana Figueiro, a professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said that, aside from The MAHA Report getting citations wrong, it also misrepresented the findings of research she actually has conducted.<\/p>\n In response, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the the Trump administration has \u201ccomplete confidence\u201d in Kennedy, while characterizing the problems as \u201cformatting issues.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut it does not negate the substance of the report,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Among that \u201csubstance\u201d is repeated suggestions that trace exposures to agricultural chemicals (like glyphosate and atrazine) are a driving factor behind rising childhood chronic disease rates, yet it leans on correlative data and decades-old findings while largely ignoring the extensive, ongoing evaluations conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other public health authorities. To point, nearly all scientific bodies and associated research have affirmed the safety of glyphosate<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some experts have said that they believe that the citation issues in The MAHA Report were partly caused by relying on generated AI to compile portions of the document, something that Leavitt declined to comment on.<\/p>\n Although it\u2019s difficult to determine whether scientific articles are generated or \u201ctouched up\u201d by AI, there are telling signs, Yuan Luo, professor and chief AI officer at Northwestern University\u2019s clinical and translational sciences institute, told USA Today<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some of those signs may include citation gaps, factual inconsistencies, and irrelevant conclusions derived from random research.<\/p>\n Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch, a site that tracks retractions in scientific journals and research, also said The MAHA Report seemed to share characteristics similar to other AI-generated work.<\/p>\n AI papers \u201ctend to hallucinate references,\u201d he said. \u201cThey come up with references that share a lot of words and authors and even journals, journal names, but they\u2019re not real.\u201d<\/p>\n HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said late Thursday that the report has been updated to correct \u201cminor citation and formatting errors.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSponsored Content on AG<\/strong>Daily\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"rfk-qualifications-protest\"](\"https:\/\/www.agdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/rfk-qualifications-protest.jpg\")