The Panican Ledger

📜 Chronicles of Misrule

Make America Healthy Again (But First, Invent the Sources)

Health Secretary Kennedy’s Commission serves up a steaming poultice of citation confusion, academic necromancy, and peer-adjacent review apparitions

“Gold-standard science,” proclaimed Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., referring to the so-called findings of his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission. A 194-page slab of epidemiological improv, the report claims to draw upon over 500 studies and sources in a display of scholarly fireworks. Alas, upon closer inspection, many of those fireworks are duds, and some may in fact be phantoms.

The watchdogs at NOTUS went spelunking into the footnotes and emerged not with confirmation, but a catalog of calamity:

• 🚫 Seven of the cited sources simply do not exist. They are, quite literally, imaginary friends with journal credentials.
• 🔗 Numerous links lead to nowhere, the academic equivalent of wandering into a cul-de-sac of broken HTML dreams.
• 🔍 Many cited studies say the opposite of what the report claims—like citing a paper on seatbelt safety to advocate reckless driving.

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👩‍⚕️ “That’s Not My Paper,” She Cried

One especially cursed citation appears to credit epidemiologist Katherine Keyes as the lead author of a study on adolescent anxiety. A curious development, as Keyes herself was unaware she had written it. When contacted by NOTUS, she politely clarified: “The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with.”

She does, in fact, study mental health and substance use. But conjuring studies she never authored into a federal report? That’s a new wellness frontier.

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📺 Now with 100% More Media Paranoia!

The report’s section on the “corporate capture of media” attempts to illustrate the influence of direct-to-consumer drug advertising on ADHD and antidepressant prescriptions for children. It boldly cites two studies as being “broadly illustrative.” And broad they are indeed—so broad, in fact, that neither study appears to exist.

Much like Kennedy’s prior “documentaries,” these phantasmal studies seem more rooted in vibes than verification. The kind of evidence one gathers while wandering through a Whole Foods with a Ouija board.

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⚗️ Conclusion: The Cure for Credibility

This is not science. This is citational cosplay with a booster shot of pseudomedical pageantry. If RFK Jr. wished to emulate the National Institutes of Health, he has instead achieved something closer to the Institute of Wishful Thinking.

The MAHA report is less a compendium of research than a séance in PDF form—channeling academic spirits, misquoting the living, and conjuring spectres from the empty air. It is the bibliographic equivalent of rubbing essential oils on a broken fact and calling it healed.

For a Secretary of Health to endorse such sorcery is not merely concerning—it is a public wellness hazard, now officially footnoted by fiction.

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