Robert Kennedy's MAHA initiative issued a report full of bogus citations and AI-generated content.
The second sentence of the introduction reads: “Today’s children are the sickest generation in American history in terms of chronic disease, and these preventable trends continue to worsen each year, posing a threat to our nation’s health, economy, and military readiness.” Yet death rates among children up to age five continue to fall, so they can’t be that sick. Could it be that more illnesses are being diagnosed today than in the past?
Sentences 3 and 4 simply repeat the message of sentences 1 and 2, while sentence 5 is nonsense: “Over the past century, U.S. GDP has grown over 30,000%.” Two of us may only be MDs, but we’re better at math than the MAHA Commission. In 1925, real GDP (2017 dollars) was about $977 billion. Real GDP (2017 dollars) in 2023 was about $22.7 trillion (according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis). The final figures for 2025 are not available yet, but 2023 serves as a useful benchmark. It’s easy to calculate that GDP has grown by 2,223 percent.
Page nine of the report claims over 40 percent of US children have a chronic health condition, citing the 2018–2019 National Survey of Children’s Health. But the survey doesn’t measure chronic conditions—it tracks current or lifelong conditions from a list that includes issues like “current anxiety problems,” “current conduct problems,” “current substance use disorder,” and “current concussion or head injury.” Many of these are temporary, and the combined prevalence reported in the survey is lower than the 40 percent figure used in the report.
Page 12 claims autism affected 1 to 4 in 10,000 children in the 1980s. But the 2007 source it cites warns that such estimates may understate prevalence due to factors like shifting criteria, increased awareness, and changing services.
On page 13, the report warns of the rise in childhood cancer rates but fails to mention that from 2001 to 2021, the cancer death rate for youth ages 0–19 years in the United States declined 24 percent, from 2.75 to 2.10 per 100,000.
The report claims on page 15 that “between 1997 and 2018, childhood food-allergy prevalence rose 88%,” based on survey data in which a parent or adult answered whether the child had a food or digestive allergy in the past year. But increased awareness over the past two decades likely led to more frequent recognition and reporting of symptoms that might have previously been overlooked or misattributed.
Even if we take the survey results at face value, the report selectively highlights only the alarming trend. It ignores the same survey’s findings that asthma attacks fell by 16.7 percent, hay fever and respiratory allergies dropped by 16 percent, and ear infections declined by 38 percent. Instead of reporting the absolute change—from 3.4 percent in 1997 to 6.4 percent in 2018—the report opts for the more dramatic “88% increase.”
Also on page 15, Footnote 43 is supposed to link the reader to an article titled “Prevalence of pediatric inflammatory bowel disease in the United States”; instead, the link directs us to a different piece titled “Model of Urgency for Liver Transplantation in Hepatocellular Carcinoma.”
Yet again on that page, the report claims celiac disease in children has increased fivefold since the 1980s but ignores that improved diagnostics and awareness likely contributed. One of its own cited studies states this clearly in the abstract.
On page 16, the commission claims that chemical exposure may be driving higher rates of chronic childhood disease, citing three sources. But none provides strong evidence to support that conclusion.
One is a literature review that clearly notes the lack of conclusive research on the effects of low-dose chemical mixtures. Another is an observational study focused on children with cancer in Nebraska, which offers no generalizable findings. The third is an editorial centered on animal and cell studies, not human children.
These are just a few inaccuracies we readily identified in the first 16 pages of the 72-page report. When a report is rushed and driven more by preconceived conclusions than by careful analysis, this is precisely the kind of quality one should expect.
