Commentary: MAHA report's misrepresentations will harm public health and hit consumers' pocketbooks

Serious followers of healthcare policy in the U.S. didn’t expect much good to emerge from its takeover by Donald Trump and his secretary of Health and Human Services, the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

But the agency and its leadership managed to live down to the worst expectations May 27, when HHS released a 73-page “assessment” of the health of America’s children titled “The MAHA Report” (for “Make America Healthy Again”).

A sloppier, more disingenuous government report would be hard to imagine. Whatever credibility the report might have had as a product of a federal agency was shattered by its obvious errors, misrepresentations and outright fabrications of source materials, some of it plainly the product of the authors’ reliance on AI bots .

At least seven sources ci