Tag: hhs

RFK Jr.’s “Gold-standard Science” Runs Into Another AI Citation Scandal

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent years denouncing the federal health establishment. And as Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, he promised to replace its failures with “gold-standard science.”

Now his department appears to have replaced some of the science with AI hallucinations.

Earlier in August, a federal judge rebuked the Department of Health and Human Services for using scientific citations that either do not exist or do not support the claims attached to them. The citations appeared in official funding notices used to reshape the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP).

The episode is especially damaging because it is not the first. In 2025, the Kennedy-chaired Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released a major report on children’s health that contained invented studies, garbled references, and visible fingerprints of artificial intelligence.

Phantom Studies Behind a Real Policy

The latest controversy comes from Hennepin County, Minnesota v. HHS, a lawsuit challenging Kennedy’s overhaul of the TPP.

Congress created the program to fund local initiatives shown to reduce teen pregnancy, along with “promising” approaches that could be tested. HHS took a much narrower approach in 2026.

The department issued new grant notices that pushed recipients toward abstinence, “body literacy,” reproductive-goals counseling and sexual-risk-avoidance education. A separate HHS policy notice barred programs from “encouraging, normalizing, or promoting sexual activity for minors” and required compliance with administration policies against “gender ideology” and DEI.

HHS also terminated virtually all existing TPP awards, according to the court.

That prompted Hennepin County, King County in Washington, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States to sue.

On August 19, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper granted a preliminary injunction against implementation of the new policy and funding notices. He found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that HHS acted arbitrarily and capriciously.

Then came the largely overlooked part that made national news this week.

A “Hallmark of AI-generated Citations”

HHS tried to support its new emphasis on “body literacy,” which it defines as understanding how a healthy body functions, including reproductive anatomy, physiology and hormonal patterns, and interpreting biological signals to make informed health decisions.

The problem was that much of the cited “science” could not be found.

 Cooper wrote:

On the topic of body literacy, the notices (remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited — a hallmark of AI-generated citations.

He continued:

Two out of the seven appear to be completely made up. Three of the seven did not publish in the cited journals but appear to have similar titles to articles published in completely different journals.… And according to the early-stage factual record, there seem to be no pregnancy prevention curricula and programs that “center [on] body literacy” and other newly-imposed TPP requirements.

HHS did not bury the questionable references in a stray litigation brief. They appeared in government notices telling applicants what “science” federal money would follow.

The court found a deeper problem. HHS itself acknowledged a “near absence of body literacy education standards nationwide.” Yet the agency made “body literacy” a central requirement for grantees.

Cooper said HHS offered no adequate explanation for imposing that approach across the program.

HHS funding materials nevertheless tell applicants that eligible programs must reflect “high-quality evidence of effectiveness” and align with its “commitment to gold-standard science.”

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HHS Sec RFK Jr.: We’ve Been ‘Mass Poisoning’ Kids with Ultra-Processed Foods

Monday on FNC’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. laid out the Trump administration’s plan to eliminate ultra-processed foods from school lunches, which he maintained were contributing to childhood obesity.

Kennedy described offering those ultra-processed foods as “mass poisoning.”

“You know, as you said, when my uncle was president, 3% of American kids were obese,” Kennedy said. “And he was also so alarmed with that, because it was double what the European numbers were. And he launched the Presidential Council on Physical Fitness. Today, 20% of the — of kids are obese and, you know, many more of them are overweight. Seventy-seven percent of our kids can’t qualify for military service. And it’s not because they suddenly became indolent or hungry or lazy. It’s because we’ve been mass poisoning them with ultra-processed foods.”

He continued, “The new rules are going to get rid of 70% of the calories that our kids take today are ultra-processed foods. That is why the obesity crisis is happening. We’re getting rid of that with the new school lunch program. We’re getting rid of ultra-processed foods. We’re putting protein at the center of the plate. We’re getting rid of the refined grains and putting in whole grain. We’re getting rid of the fruit juices, which they’ve been using to substitute instead of feeding them actual fruit. And then we’re also — my agency is adding to this, adding to what Brooke’s putting in, $32 million to help these schools bring back their kitchens, and to do other things. You know, it’s a one-time grant to schools who start cooking from scratch again, like we saw when we were kids.”

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‘Wolves In White Coats’: 5 Key Takeaways From HHS Report On Alleged Pediatric Gender-Treatment Fraud

A report released Aug. 13 by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has shined a light on alleged fraud by health providers who performed pediatric gender procedures.

The report, titled “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine’,” examined the actions and motives of 225 healthcare institutions and found they allegedly put profits and gender ideology ahead of patient needs.

Here are five key takeaways from that study.

HHS Alleges Insurance Coding Fraud

The HHS report laid out an alleged pattern of deception, encouraged by groups promoting gender procedures in children, where hospitals and healthcare providers utilized incorrect insurance codes to ensure they got paid.

Rather than use already-existing, specific codes related to gender identity disorders, HHS alleged they used what the study called “proxy diagnosis codes” that were vague, or outright false.

One common diagnosis was “endocrine disorder—unspecified,” which allowed doctors to bill for cross-sex hormones. HHS data showed that between 2015 and 2025, more than $42 million was billed to insurance companies under the unspecified disorder diagnosis.

A 2023 study by the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics found that out of 1,480 patients diagnosed with unspecified endocrine disorder, only 71 actually had such an illness. An analysis by the Manhattan Institute also found a 30 percent rise in such diagnoses between 2020 and 2022, HHS said.

Another common miscoding was for “precocious puberty,” which allowed the doctors to prescribe and bill insurers for puberty blockers. The study found that between 2015 and 2025, insurers were billed more than $11 million under this diagnosis for patients aged 13 to 17.

But that can’t be accurate, the report said, because 13 to 17 is the natural age for puberty.

Advocates Encouraged ‘Alternative Diagnosis Codes’

The World Professional Association of Transgender Health, Planned Parenthood, and other groups encouraged healthcare providers to use “alternative diagnosis codes” not related to gender dysphoria, the HHS report stated.

The Epoch Times reached out to these organizations for comment.

In one instance, a Harvard-affiliated gender clinic called Fenway Health advocated using “more vague” diagnosis codes, but also warned that using inaccurate coding is illegal.

Another organization, the Campaign for Southern Equality, put together a toolkit called “Insurance Coding Alternatives For Trans Healthcare” that outlined workarounds for patients with gender dysphoria.

Most insurers exclude gender procedures unless state law requires coverage, the document states. The toolkit shows which coding is frequently rejected by insurers, and which commonly accepted codes to use instead.

If the insurer denies coverage, the toolkit suggests appealing repeatedly. After the third appeal, the case “goes to an outside agency, and is often accepted.”

For example, a patient can claim orchialgia—persistent pain in the testicles—to justify surgical castration, according to the report.

“How do you do a mastectomy, but then bill an insurance company and not raise any red flags? … You bill it as breast reduction instead of a mastectomy,” said Dr. Eithan Haim, an author of the report.

“This guide is essentially a template for how to commit medical fraud. We should all remember that this is something that people go to prison for. This is a major deal.”

In 2024, Haim was indicted by the DOJ for allegedly exposing private information on patients after he accused a Texas hospital of secretly providing gender surgeries on minors in violation of state law. His case was dismissed with prejudice the next year.

Lifelong ‘Captive Patients’ and Revenue

So-called gender affirming care is lucrative as the “captive patients,” as the report called them, require continual medical maintenance that can last decades—or a lifetime.

“You take a little girl and put her on testosterone, or a little boy and put them on estrogen. Well, they’re going to be on that forever and ever, right?” Assistant HHS Secretary Adm. Brian Christine said in an interview with NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet.

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‘Parents Should Not Need a Chemistry Degree’: RFK Jr. Proposes Key Food Policy Reforms

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Monday unveiled two food policy proposals aimed at increasing safety and transparency in the nation’s food supply.

The agency proposed requiring food manufacturers to notify the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) whenever they determine that an ingredient added to human or animal food is “generally recognized as safe” or GRAS.

Today, companies can make those decisions without telling regulators.

HHS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) also submitted the federal government’s first proposed definition of ultraprocessed foods for final review by the FDA — a move officials said could eventually shape nutrition research, food labeling, dietary guidelines and other policies affecting what Americans buy and eat.

Officials did not release the definition or say when it would become public.

Food policy reform advocates called both proposals important first steps. However, they cautioned that the changes would not stop companies from introducing new ingredients or fully address the thousands of additives already in the food supply.

Speaking at a news conference Monday, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the proposals are designed to make it easier for people to understand what is in their food.

“Parents should not need a chemistry degree to understand what their children are eating,” he said. “Americans deserve real transparency. They deserve real food.”

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Senator Ron Johnson Says He Obtained Fauci’s COVID-Era iPhone from HHS Ahead of Contempt Vote

The Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has obtained a copy of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s COVID-era iPhone as it continues its investigation into the federal government’s handling of the pandemic and Fauci’s past lies to Congress. 

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) confirmed a Wall Street Journal report revealing that the Department of Health and Human Services provided a copy of the phone to the committee.

“The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has obtained a copy of Dr. Fauci’s phone from HHS,” Johnson, who chairs the subcommittee, wrote on X.

“Hopefully, this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week’s hearing.”

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has obtained a copy of Dr. Fauci’s phone from HHS. Hopefully, this device will address many of the questions he refused to answer at last week’s hearing. https://t.co/ltaKmGaExL

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) August 5, 2026

This comes after Fauci’s contentious Senate hearing last week, where he refused to answer any questions and invoked his Fifth Amendment right more than 100 times as Senate Republicans grilled him over the COVID pandemic and his many lies over the years.

After years of spreading COVID and vaccine disinformation, he couldn’t answer for any of it despite having a sweeping preemptive pardon from Biden.

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RFK Debunks Sen. Warren’s Hypocritical Attack on His Supposed Big Pharma ‘Conflict of Interest’

Reuters and Washington Post have a new deceptive report out claiming that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has financially benefited from a settlement with a top pharmaceutical company. But they left the crucial context out that showed he personally received not a dime.

Democrats are never ones for context. They love to have reasons to pretend they are destroying corruption when they are really going after personal political opponents. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for instance, had her warpaint and Tomahawk out as she screeched, “Is RFK Jr.’s son getting a cut of a $50 MILLION settlement that his dad could have influenced? I’m investigating.” Naturally, she needs something to investigate to avoid investigating Anthony Fauci and the pharmaceutical companies that pushed COVID vaccines that we now know, courtesy of Fauci‘s journal, were quite ineffective and sometimes injurious.

Kennedy responded to Warren and the lefty media outlets at the same time. “The Washington Post editorial board accuses me of a conflict of interest that might bias me against Big Pharma, whose interests they apparently seek to protect,” he posted on X, highlighting the irony of media and politicians rushing to defend monopolistic businesses. “The alleged conflict comes from money I supposedly made from a settlement in a lawsuit against Merck for injuries caused by its Gardasil vaccine.”

He emphatically stated: “The problem is that I never received a penny from the Merck Gardasil settlement, and neither has my son nor anyone else in my family.” So Warren et al. are smearing Kennedy with — surprise, surprise — lies.

Kennedy explained further, “Before taking office, I relinquished any interest in potential Gardasil fees back to the Wisner Baum law firm, which publicly confirmed this during my confirmation process. Yet @SenWarren, @Reuters, and @washingtonpost editorial board — in their ardor to protect Big Pharma — continue to push a false narrative that makes Big Pharma the victim and me the mendacious villain.”

For yet more interesting context, according to a Fox News report from last year, Warren received a whopping $5 million from Big Pharma during her 2020 presidential bid. And the Washington Post freaked out when Kennedy proposed limiting pharmaceutical ads. Always follow the money.

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HHS Unveils Policy To End Funding For ‘Dangerous Gain-Of-Function Research’

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on July 28 unveiled a new policy that would end federal support for “dangerous gain-of-function research,” an experiment in which scientists genetically modify an organism to enhance its characteristics.

In a statement, HHS said the policy would prohibit federal funding for dangerous gain-of-function research conducted in the United States and abroad.

It would establish stricter oversight of certain life sciences research that the government deems could pose “significant risks” to public health, biosecurity, or national security. The policy would also restrict federal funding for research conducted in countries or institutions that lack sufficient biosafety and oversight standards, according to the department.

“The federal government has a duty to protect the American people – not fund research that could put them at risk,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in the statement. “Today, we are ending federal support for dangerous gain-of-function research and replacing weak oversight with clear, enforceable safeguards.”

The policy followed President Donald Trump’s May 2025 executive order directing federal agencies to stop funding gain-of-function research in countries of concern, such as China and Iran, that lack research oversight.

According to a White House fact sheet, the order seeks to prevent federal funding from being used for foreign research that will likely cause another pandemic.

Trump’s order will halt U.S. research involving infectious pathogens and toxins until a safer and more enforceable policy can be implemented, the White House stated.

“Dangerous gain-of-function research on biological agents and pathogens has the potential to significantly endanger the lives of American citizens,” Trump said in his order. “If left unrestricted, its effects can include widespread mortality, an impaired public health system, disrupted American livelihoods, and diminished economic and national security.”

In December 2024, the Republican-led House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 520-page report detailing findings from a two-year investigation indicating that the COVID-19 virus likely originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The report found that the U.S. National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and that EcoHealth Alliance Inc. used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate this research at the lab.

The committee said COVID-19 possesses biological characteristics not found in nature and that data indicates that all COVID-19 cases stemmed from a single introduction into humans. This differs from previous pandemics, where there were more spillover events.

The report said that in January 2021, the U.S. State Department published an unclassified fact sheet that says: “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.”

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HHS So Confident an Influenza Pandemic Will Be Declared It’s Developing ‘Day One’ Vaccines, SAM.gov RFI Reveals

In a June Request for Information (RFI) titled “Protection Before Day One Vaccine: Advancing Broadly Protective Seasonal Influenza Vaccines with Pandemic Coverage,” the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is asking the biotechnology industry to develop influenza vaccines before the next pandemic begins, reflecting a level of planning that treats another influenza pandemic as a matter of when, not if.

HHS is therefore confident that there will be a future determination by authorities that an influenza pandemic has begun.

The proposal follows a series of federal future influenza pandemic-orchestrating initiatives, including Congress seeking $3.3 billion for a future influenza pandemic, HHS funding experiments determining how to make H5 influenza more pathogenic, HHS funding the creation of never-before-seen chimeric H6Nx bird flu viruses said to carry immune-evasion traits, and DARPA/NIH-funded scientists reprogramming dormant influenza parts with new replication and competition-suppressing functions.

It also comes after U.S. taxpayers funded the research behind Moderna’s new mRNA-1010 influenza vaccine and an FDA—which is under HHS—advisory committee backed the shot despite providing less than a 1% absolute benefit.

The initiatives raise a fundamental national security question: Why is the government simultaneously investing in making influenza viruses more dangerous while preparing “Day One” vaccines for the influenza pandemic it appears to expect?

You can contact HHS here to ask why the agency is planning for another influenza pandemic while simultaneously funding research that seeks to increase the capabilities of influenza viruses (see list of many such projects at the end of this article).

The RFI lists Wendy Rehman (wendy.rehman@ati.org) as the “Primary Point of Contact” for the Protection Before Day One Vaccine project.

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RFK Jr. Says HHS Found Fauci Diaries Across 11 Different Servers

Health officials located the diaries of Dr. Anthony Fauci across nearly a dozen different servers, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on July 27.

“It took us about eight months to dig these out of 11 separate servers, where they had been sequestered and secreted,” Kennedy said during an appearance on Fox News.

After obtaining the private entries of Fauci, who was the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1984 to 2022, officials with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) handed over the documents to Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). The senators have been investigating the origins of COVID-19 and the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paul, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, subsequently released diary entries from December 2019 through December 2022, combined into one document.

“I think the starkest impression that you get from reading these diaries is this massive dichotomy between what he was saying privately and what he was simultaneously saying publicly,” Kennedy, whose HHS oversees NIH, said on Fox.

Fauci’s institute had provided funding to a Wuhan laboratory to run experiments on coronaviruses, at least one of which added a feature to a virus. A 2018 research proposal outlined work that would insert a feature called a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus, which may have been done at the Wuhan lab.

In a diary entry, Fauci recounted how, during a Feb. 1, 2020, call, 9 of the 11 scientists felt that deliberate insertion of the furin cleavage site into the COVID-19 virus was possible, noting past work done at the Wuhan lab.

Fauci, though, repeatedly promoted the theory in public that the virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, came from nature.

“There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve,” Fauci told a White House briefing in April 2020. “And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”

That paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” said that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” and that no lab-based scenario was plausible.

Fauci was involved with crafting the paper, emails released by Paul show, and the paper’s authors doubted their conclusions both before and after the study’s publication, according to messages made public by Paul and others.

The following month, in May 2020, Fauci told National Geographic that there was no scientific evidence that COVID-19 was made in any lab in China.

Fauci also said in his diary that he had convinced the mayor of New York City to close schools.

“I had a similar call with Ann O’Leary, the [chief of staff] of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California,” Fauci wrote. “Ann said that based on my TV appearances today and yesterday, the Governor has decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.”

Fauci said in a 2022 interview that he had “nothing to do” with schools being closed.

Fauci declined to testify to Paul’s committee on a voluntary basis, prompting the senator in June to subpoena Fauci. The doctor is scheduled to testify before the committee on Wednesday.

Fauci, who has not responded to requests for comment, is covered against many possible charges by a preemptive pardon provided by former President Joe Biden.

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HHS Terminates the COVID-19 Emergency Use Authorization Declarations Covering mRNA Shots, Drugs, and Biologics

Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services finally moved to terminate the COVID-19 Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) declarations that have been in place since the early months of the pandemic.

The termination is not immediate. HHS has established a transition period of up to 12 months for EUA drugs and biologics and 180 days for EUA medical devices. According to the agency, the phased wind-down is intended to avoid disruptions and allow manufacturers and healthcare systems time to transition away from the emergency framework.

These declarations formed the legal foundation for the authorization of COVID-19 mRNA injections, monoclonal antibodies, antiviral drugs, diagnostic tests, ventilators, personal protective equipment, and numerous other medical products deployed during the pandemic response.

Unfortunately, the deadly Pfizer and Moderna mRNA injections are already fully FDA approved, meaning this action will have little practical effect on their continued use. The emergency framework that enabled their rapid rollout is finally being dismantled, but the products themselves have already moved beyond it.

While today’s announcement marks the formal beginning of the end of the COVID EUA era, it does not produce the outcome many of us had hoped for, including but not limited to the removal of mRNA products from the market.

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