Last week, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a controversial "Make America Healthy Again" Commission report.

The report was already criticized for blaming the decline in Americans' health woes on discredited scapegoats such as cell phone radiation and the "overmedicalization of kids."

Now it turns out the report was also relying on some extremely questionable sources to back up its claims — and quite possibly the sloppy use of generative AI.

As the Allbritton Journalism Institute's education organization, NOTUS, found in its investigation, many of the report's citations are riddled with errors. Some don't appear to exist at all.

While there's no definitive proof that Kennedy's department made use of generative AI, the results certainly bear all of the hallmarks of AI chatbots like ChatGPT.

We've already come across countless examples of AI-hallucinated citations ending up in important documents, from law firms being caught passing around bogus AI slop to scientific literature riddled with references to papers that don't exist. Like Kennedy, the White House has also been accused of using AI to draft Donald Trump's storm of executive orders.

The MAHA Commission report is, to put it lightly, extremely sketchy. According to NOTUS, of the more than 500 studies and other sources listed in the document, at least seven don't exist. Other citations include broken links — yet another hallmark sign of AI hallucinations — while others misstate conclusions.

Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, whose name was listed on a seemingly nonexistent study on anxiety in adolescents that was cited by the report, told NOTUS that the "paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with."

"We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that coauthor group, or with that title," she said.

Two other citations, which allegedly were "broadly illustrative" of how direct-to-consumer drug ads lead to more ADHD and antidepressant prescriptions for kids, were also completely made up, NOTUS found.

Other citations included grossly overgeneralized conclusions.

"It is a tremendous leap of faith to generalize from a study in one Medicaid managed care program in Texas using 2011 to 2015 data to national care patterns in 2025," pediatric pulmonologist Harold Farber, whose study was cited in the report, told NOTUS.

It's an especially troubling development, considering the Trump administration's broader war against science, undermining long-established evidence like the effectiveness of vaccines and gutting important scientific funding.

The situation has gotten so bad, a Nature poll revealed last month, that the majority of scientists are now considering leaving the United States.

Kennedy, who is severely underqualified for his role as secretary of health, admitted during a recent appearance before Congress that nobody "should be taking advice, medical advice from me."

The noted anti-vaxxer has directed health authorities to investigate nonexistent links between vaccines and autism and repeatedly refused to acknowledge the effectiveness of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot amid a devastating and preventable measles outbreak.

In other words, the apparent use of generative AI for a 73-page commission report is just the tip of the iceberg, showcasing a baffling degree of carelessness and a desire to push an agenda that isn't built on any credible scientific evidence.

"AI is useful for many things," science communicator Joe Hanson wrote in a post on Bluesky. "Making or guiding government policy is not one of them!"

"Seems like the kind of thing someone might do if they were interested in publishing propaganda to support a particular agenda rather than letting science guide their health policy," he added.

More on Kennedy: Trump's Crackpot Secretary of Health Admits That Literally Nobody Should Be Taking Medical Advice from Him


Share This Article