The White House said citation errors were “formatting issues” and that did not undermine the importance of the report.

The U.S. government said it would modify its flagship report on children's health, which was found to cite non-existent research.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that any citation errors were due to "formatting issues" and would be updated. The report's problems would not help President Donald Trump's appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The report, compiled and published by the Make Amuranth Realthy (Maha) Committee (MAHA) Committee (MAHA) Committee (MAHA) Committee issues were revealed by the digital news media Notus. It found that seven studies without reference existed, and links were also broken and “misunderstood conclusions.”

Leavitt insists that the problem “has no denying the essence of the report, as you know, one of the most transformative health reports the federal government has ever made.”

The report found that processed foods, chemicals, stress, and overprescription of drugs and vaccines may be factors behind chronic diseases in children, citing more than 500 studies.

However, the authors believe that some of these studies show that they are not part of the study, or that the study does not exist.

Noah Kreski, a researcher at Columbia University, was listed as the author of a paper on teenage anxiety and depression during Covid-19, told AFP News that the paper was “not one of our studies” and “does not seem to be a fundamentally existing study.”

Citations for the report include links to an article in the peer-reviewed JAMA Pediatric Medicine Review. A spokesperson for JAMA Network said the article was "not published in JAMA PAIDIATRICS or any JAMA Network Journal".

The Democratic National Committee lashed out the report on Thursday as “a rampant”, accusing Kennedy’s agency of “proving its policy priorities with non-existent research and sources.”

Kennedy's approval from the Health Secretary in February caused major controversy. He has spent decades before having questions about the safety of the vaccine, which has raised concerns among the scientific and medical communities about the policies he will adopt.

Since taking office, he has fired thousands of workers to federal health agencies and cut billions of dollars from spending on biomedical research.

"The essence of the Maha report is the same - the federal government's historic and transformative assessment to understand the chronic disease epidemic that has caused our country's children to suffer," the Ministry of Health and Human Services said.