NOTUS reporters Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto recently made headlines after breaking a bombshell story on how Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” report cited several studies that didn’t exist.
Then, on June 11, they returned with another big takeaway: RFK Jr. used the report to advance vaccine misinformation.
The Institute spoke with Kennard and Manto to find out the story behind their scoop.
Can you walk us through how you first discovered the falsities in the MAHA report released in May?
Manto: I got a tip over Memorial Day weekend that there might be some issues in the MAHA report. I started checking the citations Saturday morning. For some reason I decided to check bottom-up, which was lucky since the last two citations both turned out to be fabricated. That definitely motivated me to check every citation.
My NOTUS colleague Emily Kennard and I checked them all over the next few days. To be absolutely certain that we weren’t missing real research, Emily had the good idea to reach out to the “authors” of the fake papers.
Once we heard back from them saying they’d never heard of the papers they’d supposedly authored, we felt ready to publish.
When the original article was published, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the MAHA report, citing the errors as “formatting issues” rather than factual errors. What advice do you have for reporters when government officials try to spin the story incorrectly?
Kennard: We gave administration officials the opportunity to comment on our findings before we published them. They didn’t comment.
Our reporting proved that the issues went beyond formatting, and I hope the investigation speaks for itself. As reporters, that’s all we can do. We aren’t responsible for how officials handle any resulting PR cleanup — that’s above our pay grade.
How did you go deeper into the story to find out the issues surrounding vaccine effectiveness that you published yesterday?
Kennard: Secretary Kennedy often gets called out for his past anti-vaccine efforts, so we figured we should take a closer look at that section in the report, which we thought was surprisingly short. Homing in on just one section, rather than all 78 pages and 522 citations, allowed us to focus much more on the specific claims and the research the report uses to back them up.
When you are reporting on lengthy documents like the MAHA report, how do you stay organized and on deadline?
Manto: I made a color-coded spreadsheet to keep track of all the citations and the issues we found as we went through them. We split that sheet into topic sections once it became clear we’d have to go through the citations for scientific merit.
As far as staying on deadline, it felt like such a hiding-in-plain-sight kind of story that we were pretty motivated to get it done as quickly as possible. Constantly communicating (Emily and I sit next to each other in the office) and Congress being out of session also helped!
What is your advice for finding a scoop on a heavily reported topic like health policy?
Manto: Do things that seem boring or like more trouble than they’re worth. Those are the things no one else will do, so you might break some ground.
But more importantly, to all the hiring managers reading this: Emily and I are both fellows at NOTUS. When our fellowship term ends next year, hire us and we will find more scoops for you.