The White House said citing errors are a “format of the problem” that does not undermine the importance of reporting.
The US government says it will amend its flagship report on child health, which found to cite non-existent studies.
White House spokesman Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that the citing error was due to “format in question” and would be updated. The issue of the report rarely alleviates concerns over President Donald Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and welfare secretary.
The issues with the report, compiled and published by the Make America Healthy (MAHA) committee last week, were revealed by digital news outlet Notus. Although we found that the seven studies referenced did not exist, there were also broken links and “false conclusions.”
Leavitt argued that the issue was “don’t deny the contents of the report. This is, as you know, one of the most transformative health reports ever released by the federal government.”
The report found that processed foods, chemicals, stress, and overprescriptions of drugs and vaccines could be factors behind chronic illness in children, citing more than 500 studies.
However, the authors believed to have produced some of these studies stated that they were not part of the study or that the study was absent.
Noah Cresski, a researcher at Columbia University, who was listed as the author of a paper on adolescent anxiety and depression during Covid-19, told AFP News Agency that the paper was “not one of our studies” and “it appears to be a completely unexisting study.”
The report quote included a link to a broken, peer-reviewed article from Jama Paediatrics Medical Review. A JAMA Network spokesman said that the article was not listed in Jama Paediatrics or the Jama Network Journal.
A Democratic National Committee on Thursday denounced the report as “false and false,” and accused Kennedy’s agency of “justifying policy priorities with non-existent research and sources.”
Kennedy’s approval as health secretary in February sparked serious controversy. He previously held doubts about vaccine safety for decades and raised concerns within the science and medical community than the policies he pursued.
Since taking on this role, he has fired thousands of workers at federal health agencies, cutting billions of dollars from biomedical research spending.
“The MAHA report remains the same: the historical and transformative assessment by the federal government is a historical and transformative assessment to help understand the epidemic of chronic diseases that are worrisome to our country’s children,” the Department of Health and Human Services said.