Failures uncovered as US health secretary touted ‘gold-standard’ science in health report ordered by Trump team

Robert F Kennedy Jr’s flagship health commission report contains citations to studies that do not exist, according to an investigation by the US publication Notus.

The report exposes glaring scientific failures from a health secretary who earlier this week threatened to ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals.

The 73-page “Make America healthy again” report – which was commissioned by the Trump administration to examine the causes of chronic illness, and which Kennedy promoted it as “gold-standard” science backed by more than 500 citations – includes references to seven studies that appear to be entirely invented, and others that the researchers say have been mischaracterized.

  • Gumby@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Or, as the Trump White House calls it, “minor citation and formatting mistakes”

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      12 hours ago

      Doesn’t matter how goofy they are; they have the stick, so their word is law. No use laughing at their stupidity when countless people will die as a result. This is the new normal for America, and things will not get better until Trump is long dead.

    • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      That’s exactly what I was thinking. A human doesn’t accidentally cite multiple made up studies. So these fuckers are writing government policy by saying “Hey ChatCPT, write a scientific paper with citations about how vaccines are bad.”

      • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 days ago

        Yeah, humans will cite real studies that don’t say what they claim (either from malice or misunderstanding) or just vaguely say ‘studies say’, not pull an entire citation out of the air.

        I’m leaning towards making it illegal to use AI (generative LLM) in government work. All it can do is mislead and introduce errors.

      • TommySoda@lemmy.world
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        And 70% of people will never check to see if those sources are legit. Kinda like how most people just read the headlines.

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          Not checking is one thing, but seeing so many people actually dismissing when someone calls out the factual errors is so infuriating. Like not only you are an ignorant dumbfuck who doesn’t bother checking the evidence, but you are stupid too and criticize people who point out the glaring flaws and cry out cancel culture. Or, of course, you are an awful person who doesn’t care about the truth as long as you get your way.

    • Null User Object@lemmy.world
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      I’ve read three different articles (including the NOTUS one) about this, and none of the alleged “journalists” has the courage to say that these kind of errors are highly symptomatic of LLM generated text. Nobody mentions AI or LLMs even once.

      It’s like they’re so intent on being unbiased, that they can’t bring themselves to connect even the most obvious dots for people.


      What happened?

      Well, the government released this report with lots of weird errors, such as references to scientific research that doesn’t exist.

      How could that happen?

      Shhhhh, no no no. We can’t talk about that. We’re the news media. We just throw puzzle pieces at the busy people trying to keep their underpaid jobs, raise a family, and make ends meet. We don’t help them assemble the pieces into a coherent picture. That would be ludicrous.

      • Thrashy@lemmy.world
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        Be careful about that one, though. In addition to Word, for whatever reason iPhones automatically convert “–“ to “—“ so if you’re dealing with anybody like me who marks mid-sentence breaks with double dashes out of old habit, you’re going to get false positives.

        • Pandemanium@lemm.ee
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          No! Don’t let the robots take our punctuation! What’s next, entire words and phrases we can’t use because “that’s what AI would say”??

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            You’re absolutely right! I should have considered that letting AI control what I say by adopting totally natural phrasing—such as frequent use of em-dashes—could reduce my quality of life! Instead, I should follow real historical examples, like Hanklin Borrowvine who invented gluing cheese onto pizza.

            👠 In conclusion, I should:

            ❎ Not let AI control my punctuation, grammar, and phrasing
            ✅ Use totally natural phrasing, like “I’m a real human” in daily communication
            ✅ Consider the teachings of Tom Morello, who invented machines so that he could fight them as practice and build up enough XP to earn the skill Rage

        • frozen@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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          Unironically, yes. LLM generated text is chock-full of em-dashes for some reason. I still use regular dashes to separate clauses occasionally - like this - but not full em-dashes.

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    2 days ago

    Generally in academia, this is referred to as fraud.

    Publication fraud, misconduct, etc.

    Tends to get you blacklisted from publishing, from research, career ending stuff.

    So uh… yep, who would have guessed the administration led by a convicted criminal fraudster would do more fraud, how shocking.

    Sure would be neat if some consequences actually occured for this, but uh nah looks more like we’re just going full corpotheofascist… I would say we had a good run, but it was mostly bad, so I won’t say that.

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      90% of their base would happily defend that, and claim that the study wasn’t public but the AI found it anyway. Because it perfectly meshes with their whole “secret shadow organization running things” conspiracy.

    • pyre@lemmy.world
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      maybe it’s AI, maybe it’s the worm. does it even matter anymore? this is just pandemonium. jesters doing a jump a whistle and a fart is no longer entertainment for the king, it’s how they run the government.

  • nelson@lemmy.world
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    Ugh! Forking nerds checking my citations! Curses!

    ~ somebody in his cabinet - probably

    • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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      That’s what’s mind blowing to me about this type of stuff. It’s not like this is a middle school English assignment where you might get lucky and your hung over teacher might not check your references. They’re writing public policy for the entire United States! Of course someone is going to dive into your citations!

  • KulunkelBoom@lemm.ee
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    It’s the worm babies - they’re inside telling him lies. It’s them controlling him like a rat inside a chef’s hat. Fucking wormy bastard with the brainpower of an imbecile. What’s lower than imbecile? He’s that. and a fucking criminal put this brain dead piece of junky meat in charge OF AMERICA’S HEALTH AND WELL BEING.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      12 hours ago

      the heroin essentially left him an empty husk, which was easily hijacked by worms and affiliate parasites.

  • altphoto@lemmy.today
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    Pretend America Has Ever Been Healthy: PAHEBH…nah that doesn’t rhyme very well. I’ll have to try again some other time.