Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is totally full of shit as his Make America Healthy Again report is full of errors, non-existent studies, along with citations that make zero sense.
While Kennedy's report takes aim at childhood vaccines, ultraprocessed foods and pesticides, studies listed were either misinterpreted or didn't exist, leaving the White House to blame artificial intelligence for the errors and omissions.
One study, that supports the claim that psychotherapy is a better treatment for children experiencing mental health issues than medication, was replaced by another “systemic overview” by Pim Cuijpers, a widely referenced psychologist in Amsterdam. But Cuijpers explained that his study covered the use of psychiatric medication in adults, not children.
The two “cannot be compared, and this reference is therefore not usable in adolescents,” Cuijpers wrote in an email. He also noted that there was no evidence to support the report’s claim that psychotherapy was more effective than antidepressants for adolescents.
Kennedy's report claimed that “antidepressant prescription rates in teens increased by 14-fold between 1987 and 2014” was a little less convincing considering that antidepressants were only developed in the late 1980s.
“So it can also be said that these drugs were simply used for the adolescents who could benefit from them,” said Cuijpers. Another false Kennedy claim is that “since the 1970s, recess and physical education (PE) have steadily declined.”
Yet another incorrect citation referred to pulmonologist Harold J. Farber, but didn’t cite an actual paper he’d worked on to support the claim that “an estimated 25-40% of mild cases” of asthma were overprescribed drugs. The new citation referred to Farber’s actual study, which had been about a Medicaid-managed care program study in Texas, but Farber said that the notion that those results applied to the general population required a “tremendous leap of faith.”
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