Bulwark Takes - RFK’s Health Report Is a Mess

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Sam Stein sits down with NOTUS reporter Margaret Manto to break down RFK Jr.’s MAHA report—a document packed with fake citations, broken links, and bogus studies.

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tender, juicy, and its own sauce. Would you look at that? Well, you can't see it, but trust me, it looks delicious. New Mcrispy strips, now at McDonald's. Hey guys, me Sam Stein, managing editor at The Bullwork, and I am back again. I am joined by Margaret Manto, who is a reporter at Notis. Margaret is joining us from what is a conspicuous looking DC office space, I presume. I don't know if that's Notis headquarters, but thank you for joining us. We're here to talk about her excellent story, which is getting a ton

of attention in DC circles and frankly outside of it. It's called the Maha Report Site Studies that don't exist. For those that don't know, the Maha Report is what the administration has put out under Robert F. Kennedy's leadership. It came out a couple days ago. It looks at the classic Kennedy issues. We're going to dive into it before we do subscribe to our YouTube feed. We really appreciate that.

All right, Margaret, tell us a little bit about your story. So I have been following the Maha Report since it came out. I read it closely last week. And there's a lot to get into but over the weekend I got a tip that there were maybe some issues with some of the citations within the report. So this story was looking at every single one and we found that a couple did not exist. I just want to be clear there's 522 citations in this report. Not everyone is like a medical journal or anything like that. There's news reports. You look at all 522. We did, yeah.

Was it just you clicking on it? Because it's like small font. I found it very difficult to even look at it. Yeah, it was me and my colleague, Emily. We did basically click on all of them. Okay. So let's talk about the talk about sort of the broad picture here. So in certain cases, when you say that some of the citations were to reports that didn't exist, some were just broken links. How significant a deal is it to do this? Well, I know if I had tried to turn in a paper with these issues in college, would have not gone well for me. But yeah, it really depends, I think, on the specific citation, you know, some of them, like you said, just had broken links, or,

you know, maybe said that the study was in the wrong journal or had the wrong authors, which, you know, is is an issue. It's an error in the wrong journal or had the wrong authors, which, you know, is an issue. It's an error in the citation. Yeah, sure. It's bad homework. It's sloppy work. It calls into question who constructs the report, but it's clerical. Yeah. But then for seven citations, seven out of 522, we found that we couldn't find the study that it was supposedly citing at all. And we reached out to the supposed authors of these studies who are real researchers.

And a couple of them got back to us and said, wow, I have never heard of this paper that I've supposedly written. So. Wow. And there were other occasions where there were citations that went to proper studies, but it misrepresented the actual conclusions of the studies too. Yeah, we did find some that were the studies that they were citing said something different than what the report was saying. And so that's definitely something that we want to look into because again, it's a lot of studies.

You reached out to HHS. Actually, let's step back for a second. Let's talk about who put together this report and why it was put together. So this report was put together by the Make America Healthy Again Commission, which President Trump put together via executive order. It's headed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Other cabinet members are on the commission, the head of NIH, head of FDA, they're all on the commission, along with other White House figures who have contributed. And why do they decide they need to put together this report? So Kennedy has a lot of concerns about chronic disease in kids. And so this report basically outlines all of the things that he thinks are causing chronic disease in children. It's a 73 page report. How much time did they take to put it together? The commission was set up, I believe, in February, so just a couple of months.

Is that normal? Two months to put together a report of this magnitude for a government study? It is a big report to put together in two months to put together a report of this magnitude for a government study? It is a big report to put together in two months. I can say that a lot of scientific studies and reviews, which this basically is a type of review, could take significantly longer. The news reports around the report have been sort of, I guess, mixed and interesting. For example, there are some stuff that people are complementary of, how it looks at processed foods, for instance, what we're doing in terms of diet and health.

There are some things that are unexpected. For instance, they assume that there are going to be more attacks from pesticides, but in fact, they report, you know, praised American farmers and there are suggestions, for instance, that industry got in the way of that. And then there's, of course, the question of vaccines, which kind of haunts Kennedy no matter what. And the report does raise concerns about vaccinations and over vaccinations, but it doesn't go quite as far as Kennedy has gone in his prior life around this stuff. What was the sort of larger

scientific community takeaway about what this report did and said? Yeah, I think a good portion of the report is based on real science. And a lot of scientists who have been studying things like ultra-processed foods or the dangers of chemicals that have been approved for use on crops or in our foods or our cosmetics, I think see a lot of value in this level of oversight and kind of this language coming from the highest levels of the government. But yeah, there are definitely other areas where the report veers away from the scientific consensus. So it really just depends on the specific issue and the language. How, but it has to be completely damaging to the credibility of the report itself to have

citations that just don't exist. I mean, that I'm just just going to be honest about it. If that were to, if anything like this were to appear in JAMA or New England Journal of Medicine, they would have to remove the report. They would have to retract it. Yeah, I think you are totally right that this kind of issue is a big concern right now when it comes to scientific community. And Kennedy has said that he wants more transparency and credibility in science so yeah this this would not lend itself to that conclusion. You don't say it in the story but it's the logical

conclusion which is that some of this was put together with LLMs or AI. Do you have any indication or that that is the case? So. Do you have any indication that that is the case? So we don't have any indication right at this moment that this report was put together in any form by AI. It's certainly a possibility. This is the kind of thing that we know AI can do when you ask it to generate scientific citations it can sometimes hallucinate studies that don't exist. So we know it can happen. We don't know if that's what's happened here.

Did HHS get back to you at all? Not yet. Hopefully soon. Yeah. It feels like something that they're going to have to answer for at some point. Yeah. Well, hopefully they will respond to my email, Sam, because I'm very curious to see what they have to say.

Where do you think it goes from here? The Maha movement obviously has adherence. Have you picked up any sort of anger within the movement that their first big report ultimately backfired to the degree that it has because they relied on studies that are they cited, I should say, a handful of studies that frankly didn't exist or misrepresent others? Or is this a case where they're just sort of like willing to look past the stuff because frankly, they often have looked past similar things where similar misrepresentations. It's a really good question. I don't think we've seen fully what the response from the maha crowd will be to this. So yeah.

What's the response you're seeing? It's your story. I mean, surely you're online. You've been calling people. I'm sure. Yeah. What's going on? Tell me more. Yeah. I think they're keeping quiet on it for now Maybe waiting for some some response from HHS like we all are so yeah I think it will have to play out a little bit more before we see any big big response Can you reveal a little bit more about the tipster? I know this is getting into sensitive territory But were you shocked when you got a little tip? Like how, what was it?

Were you intrigued by it? Were you concerned with deep fake? What was going on in your head? To be totally honest, I was like, oh my gosh, there goes my Memorial Day weekend. What are you talking about? That seems like a great Memorial Day weekend to go through 520 citations on a Maha report. It was a really fun time. Yeah, it was really-

No it wasn't, get the- You're lying. Hey, I used to be a scientist in a past life, so in some ways it was kind of muscle memory, but yeah, it was a time to go through them all. Fortunately I had help, so it wasn't me alone. Well look, thank you for doing this. It's a great story. I encourage everyone to read it. It's the Maha Report site studies that don't exist. It's on notice. Margaret Manto, thank you so much.

Appreciate it so much. And thank you guys for watching our feed. Really appreciate that. As I said earlier, subscribe to the feed so you can get great interviews like this and we'll talk again soon.