In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.
A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.
Another leading anti-vaxxer is presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
The White House’s “Make America Healthy Again” report, which issued a dire warning about the forces responsible for Americans’ declining life expectancy, bears hallmarks of the use of artificial intelligence in its citations. That appears to have garbled citations and invented studies that underpin the report’s conclusions.
Trump administration officials have been repeatedly revising and updating the report since Thursday as news outlets, beginning with NOTUS, have highlighted the discrepancies and evidence of nonexistent research.
Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said that “minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.” .
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- The referenced report is real. But the inclusion of "oaicite," a marker of the use of OpenAI, in the URL offers a definitive sign that artificial intelligence was used to collect research.
- This dead URL was live as recently as 2017, according to archived versions of the site. AI experts said chatbots can produce outdated links in response to queries because they were trained using older material.
Margaret Manto and Emily Kennard at NOTUS:
The Trump administration’s clean up of the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission’s hallmark and error-riddled report is opening new questions about how the report’s authors drew some of its sweeping conclusions about the state of Americans’ health.
At least 18 of the original report’s citations have been edited or completely swapped out for new references since NOTUS first revealed the errors Thursday morning. While some of the original report’s inconsistencies have been changed, a few of the new updated citations continue to misinterpret scientific studies.
