The report by the Make America Healthy Again Commission has been released, and if we know nothing else, we can be certain that artificial intelligence isn’t ready for prime time. According to early reviews, at least seven references contained in the document were made up and AI has received the blame. The failure of artificial intelligence is a shame, because Washington is a place starved for intelligence of any kind.
If the reliance on wonky AI was a surprise, the conclusions of the report were not. It exactly paralleled the things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been saying throughout his career as a lawyer and activist. Incidentally, the vast majority of the members of the group making up the MAHA Commission had backgrounds in fields other than medicine and science. No surprise there. Expertise is a bug, not a feature, when it comes to MAHA.
The report starts out by contrasting health performance in the U.S. against the rest of the world, and finds us falling short of other developed nations. As pointed out in an essay about the report by the Cato Institute, the graph displayed in the report clearly shows that we have had a lower life expectancy than our peers since at least 1970, long before the advent of smartphones or glyphosate. As anyone who follows these issues knows, we kill each other and ourselves with cars and guns at a rate much higher than other nations. Much can be said about that, but nothing is said in the MAHA report.
When the authors of the report are not making up sources, they often misquote or misconstrue the actual sources. According to the MAHA report, over 40% of U.S. children have a chronic condition. But Cato points out that the study used as a reference for that figure includes temporary conditions, and even so, all of the diseases mentioned in the referenced report don’t add up to 40%.
MAHA also fails to make the point that some of the increase in illness is a result of improved diagnostic tools. For example, one of the references cited in the report makes it clear that much of the increase in autism, a particular bugaboo of Kennedy, is a result of changes in the way we diagnose the condition.
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The actual authors of the report aren’t mentioned, which I suppose is not surprising, given the suspicion it was written by a large language model. Rumor has it that Calley Means, who sells dietary supplements and is a brother to Surgeon General-nominee Casey Means, was instrumental in writing the report.
Casey Means is the perfect surgeon general for the MAHA era and will no doubt be confirmed by the same Senate who brought us RFK Jr. as the secretary of HHS. Dr. Means has testified before the Senate as recently as last year that:,“I learned virtually nothing at Stanford Medical School about the tens of thousands of scientific papers that elucidate the root causes of why American Health is plummeting.” This is because Stanford Medical School would like to keep its accreditation. The casual observer of Dr. Means’ career would no doubt surmise that “root causes” were not the only gap in Dr. Means' education.
Amongst other unusual beliefs held by Dr. Means are a proclivity for psychedelic mushrooms and a belief that raw milk is safe, as long as you “form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then decide if I feel safe to drink the milk from his farm."
Like many farm kids, I grew up on raw milk and often did the milking. I’ve seen what a paper filter captures from milk brought to the house by a 12 year old, and that memory has made me a proponent of pasteurization. Trust me, I’m lucky to be alive.
In other news, Bayer has publicly expressed doubts that they will continue to produce Roundup, one of the farm chemicals mentioned in the MAHA report. Most government reports end up gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, but this report, as flaky as it is, has no doubt increased the likelihood that many of the tens of thousands of suits against Bayer and Roundup will be successful. Bayer has said that the litigation costs for defending Roundup are greater than the total revenue they receive from selling the most widely used defense against weeds. Unlike many of the claims made in the MAHA report, the science surrounding the safety of Roundup is clear and overwhelming.
When Roundup disappears, and I’m afraid it will, some other tool of modern farming will take its place in the dock and in the crosshairs of MAHA. We are on a path that will reduce yields and increase the cost of food. Hunger is the most damaging chronic condition of all.
Blake Hurst is a farmer and greenhouse grower in northwest Missouri.