A landmark report on children’s health that was found to contain no-existent studies will be amended by the US government.
Any citation errors, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, were the result of “formatting issues” and would be fixed. Concerns about President Donald Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary will be little tempered by the shortcomings of the report.
Digital news outlet NOTUS made the findings of the report, which was produced and released last week and featured the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission. According to it, seven of the studies cited did not exist, and there were also “misstated conclusions” and broken links.
According to Leavitt, the issues do not “overstate the report’s substance,” which is one of the most transformative health reports the federal government has ever produced.
More than 500 studies were cited in the report, which found that processed foods, chemicals, stress, and the overprescribing of vaccines and medications were possible causes of childhood chronic illness.
However, some of the authors who were credited with developing those studies claimed they were not involved in the study or that they were unrelated to it.
Noah Kreski, a researcher at Columbia University who is listed as one of the authors of a paper on adolescent anxiety and depression during COVID-19, claimed the paper was “not one of our studies” and “doesn’t seem to be a study that exists at all.”
A broken article was included in the report’s citation, along with a link to one in the peer-reviewed JAMA Paediatrics Medical Review. The article referred to “was not published in JAMA Paediatrics or any JAMA Network journal,” according to a spokesperson for the JAMA Network.
The Democratic National Committee criticized the report on Thursday, calling it “rife with misinformation” and accusing Kennedy’s organization of “justifying its policy priorities with studies and sources that don’t exist.”
Significant controversy erupted as a result of Kennedy’s approval as health secretary in February. He had previously sparked controversy in the scientific and medical sectors by denying whether vaccines were safe for use for decades.
He has cut billions of dollars from biomedical research spending and fired thousands of federal health agency employees since taking the position.
The Department of Health and Human Services stated that the MAHA report’s main themes remain the same: it is a historic and groundbreaking study of the chronic disease epidemic affecting children across the country.
Source: Aljazeera
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