The CDC Got Caught Citing a Fake Study. Again.

By now, you’d think the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, AKA the CDC, would have learned that making up studies is a bad look.

It makes people think you’re not writing the all-important health reports that inform our nation’s citizens and medical professionals. Instead, you’re letting AI chatbots write them for you, which are notorious for fabricating citations.

We’re only a handful of months into the first year of the second Trump administration, and already, this is not the first time this has happened. But here we are again, watching the CDC—or at least some lesser version of the agency now effectively helmed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—repeat the same mistake.

Or, perhaps more realistically, though not confirmed, allowing an AI chatbot to make the same mistake.

The CDC Just Got Caught Citing Another Fake Study

This week, a CDC briefing slated for presentation to its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices cited a 2008 study about thimerosal, a mercury-based vaccine preservative, linking it to long-term brain effects. Unfortunately, the study doesn’t exist.

The presentation, authored by Lyn Redwood, a former leader of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense, claimed that a paper in the journal Neurotoxicology showed neuroimmune harm from neonatal thimerosal exposure. But the scientist allegedly behind the study, UC Davis Professor Emeritus Robert Berman, says he never wrote such a thing.

Berman did co-author a similarly titled paper in Toxicological Sciences, but it found no behavioral evidence linking thimerosal to autism. You might recognize that as being the exact opposite of Redwood’s claim. He was understandably “concerned and displeased” to see his name attached to what he described as a “misrepresentation.”

Once the issue was flagged, the CDC quietly updated Redwood’s presentation to delete the bogus citation. Just last month, Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” report from the Trump administration’s HHS was also found to include citations to studies that don’t exist. Kennedy dismissed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.”

Things appear not to be going well over at the CDC, as Kennedy recently decided to fire all 17 members of the agency’s vaccine advisory panel and replace them with eight newcomers, half of whom have anti-vaccine records.

Senators from both parties have called to delay the meeting, citing concerns over the legitimacy of the panel and how some of them seem dead set on making Americans sicker and more prone to dying.

It’s not exactly comforting to know that the people who are running the various health-related departments of the federal government seem to be actively hostile toward the American people, scientific consensus, and the mere concept of responsibility toward maintaining a healthy populace.

But this is what America wanted, I guess—a bunch of liars, cheaters, know-nothings, and just general duplicitous corporatist idiots running the nation. Certainly, lots to be proud of with July 4th right around the corner. The vibrant colors of that flag of never felt so muted.