One of the truly remarkable—and depressing—things that I’ve observed since the longtime antivax activist who is now our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., first coined the slogan “make America healthy again” whose abbreviation MAHA now stands for everything from antivax activism to promoting lots of supplements and even cancer quackery, with a dollop of science-based considerations of the effect of healthy diet and lifestyle as determinants of health in order to disguise the stench of pseudoscience, has been to watch how quickly MAHA has become normalized, to the point where a usually good news outlet, STAT News, buys into the normalization.
What do I mean? Last week, STAT News published two op-eds, one from a public health scientist and one from a MAHA activist, apparently in search of a “kumbaya” moment, asking not just “Can’t we all just get along?” but also, “What can public health learn from MAHA?” Don’t get me wrong. I’m usually all for opponents listening to each other and trying to find common ground as a basis for working together. Maybe there even is some common ground between MAHA and science-based public health, although I would argue that it is a lot less expansive than the editors of STAT News seem to think and almost completely ignores the real problems with MAHA with respect to science. Unfortunately, the work of coming to an understanding with what have to this point been implacable foes involves very hard work that cannot shirk the real issues. Unfortunately, as you will see, these op-eds help normalize MAHA by portraying the movement as just a bunch of people interested in healthy food, clean water, more exercise, rather than a movement built around one of the most antivaccine of antivaccine activists in our nation’s history, RFK Jr., as a cloak to shield his antivax agenda in the guise of wanting to tackle chronic disease and champion more “natural” and “healthy” food and lifestyle.
What STAT News editors have done is to commission two op-eds, one by Monica Wang, ScD, MS, an associate professor of public health at the Boston University School of Public Health and one by Aaron Everitt, who is described as a “freelance writer from Colorado who was active in the RFK Jr. presidential campaign as a volunteer.” The articles are entitled:
- What public health can learn from the MAHA movement (Monica Wang). Tagline: Listening to MAHA advocates helped me realize what public health is missing.
- I’m a MAHA activist. I went into the public health lion’s den — and it changed how I think (Aaron Everitt). Tagline: Public health is not the enemy. The system is. Note that this is an edited version of a post that Everitt originally published in March on his Substack entitled Why MAHA Needs Public Health. (As you will see, the differences between the original article and the edited STAT News version are important.)
The first thing I noticed about these articles is how assiduously they both avoid the elephant in the room, vaccines. Wang only mentions vaccines once in passing and medical misinformation as though it were not a primary element of huge swaths of MAHA, while Everitt mentions vaccines not at all. In this, both writers accept the frame that RFK Jr. tried so hard to encompass MAHA in right from the beginning, namely that MAHA is not about vaccines (or that it is not primarily about vaccines).
Let’s see how the messages go past each other. Again, I understand that dialogue is necessary. What I have a problem with is the way the results of this particular dialogue are being framed and how the dialogue appears to have avoided the really hard issues that make MAHA so problematic in favor of a narrative that ignores its antivax roots and activism.
Learning (mostly) the wrong lessons from MAHA
It is important to note right at the outset that Dr. Wang is the real deal as a public health scientist. As her university biography notes, she is Associate Professor of Community Health Sciences at the Boston University School of Public Health, an Adjunct Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Executive Editor of Public Health Post and has been principal investigator on “NIH and foundation-funded research totaling more than $6 million, advancing efforts to improve nutrition and support the health of children, families, and underserved communities.” Very impressive indeed, certainly—and it doesn’t bother me to say this—considerably more impressive than my academic career. So, right away, I have to take her opinion seriously, even as I read a few seriously cringe-inducing passages in her op-ed.
So, let’s let Dr. Wang tell us how this whole dialogue came about in her op-ed:
“I didn’t expect to find myself face to face with leaders and activists from the “Make America Healthy Again” movement in respectful dialogue, or to consider inviting one into a public health classroom. But that’s exactly where I found myself this spring.
At a national public health meeting in March, I attended a session that brought together public health professionals, physicians, and MAHA leaders for a rare, good-faith conversation. I went out of curiosity. I left with a level of clarity I hadn’t expected — and a few unexpected connections.”
Mr. Everitt was similarly surprised, as he states in his companion piece:
Yet I found myself recently, and reluctantly, headed to the citadel of arrogance: Washington (well, Arlington, Va., to be more specific). At the invitation of Brinda Adhikari — one of the hosts of the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” — I attended the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health’s annual meeting, where I spoke on a panel about engaging in civil conversation in a session called “A Dialogue Between Academic Public Health and MAHA.”
Curious as to who else was on the panel besides Mr. Everitt, I searched out the meeting website to look for the actual session, which I found here. (Dr. Wang was an attendee, not a panelist or the moderator.) On the public health side, the host was Sandro Galea, MD, MPH, DrPH, Margaret C. Ryan Dean, Eugene S. and Constance Kahn Distinguished Professor in Public Health, and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives, Washington University in St. Louis School of Public Health. Joining him on the public health side, the panel also featured Megan L. Ranney, MD, MPH, FACEP, Dean.,Yale School of Public Health, and Craig Spencer, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice; Associate Professor of the Practice of Emergency Medicine; Faculty Fellow at The Watson School of International and Public Affairs Brown University School of Public Health. (I wonder what he thinks of his fellow Brown University faculty, oncologist turned MAHA-curious and borderline antivax, Wafik El-Deiry, MD.) In any event, both are what I’d call heavy hitters in the world of public health. On the MAHA side, the panel featured Aaron Everitt and Elizabeth Frost, the latter billed as “Political Consultant, Campaign Strategist, and Co-Founder, Independent Force LLC.”
Moderating the panel was Tom Johnson, co-host of the “Why Should I Trust You?” podcast (WSITY), a podcast that we’ve encountered before when it gave a softball interview to then chair of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) Dr. Kirk Milhoan, allowing him to spew antivax disinformation largely unchallenged. Let’s just say that it’s not necessarily a good idea to bridge some divides “rebuilding trust.” Or maybe a better way of putting it is that public health scientists and the press acquiescing to antivax narratives—or, just as bad, sweeping them under the table in the name of this goal—is an unacceptable price to pay to “rebuild trust” that will backfire.
My first impression looking at this lineup was that the representatives of MAHA were not anything I’d call top-tier MAHA. There was no Del Bigtree, for instance, no Mark Gorton, no Tony Lyons, and none of the more prominent MAHA-aligned activists. Mr. Everitt was a volunteer for RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign before RFK Jr. dropped out to bend the knee to Donald Trump in return for a promise to be allowed to “go wild on health” and have a high-ranking health-related position in the administration. (And health-related positions in any Presidential administration don’t get any higher than HHS Secretary.) Ms. Frost, on the other hand, runs Independent Force, a political consulting agency in Ohio. Her LinkedIn profile shows that she is on the board of directors of MAHA Ohio; so I concede that would make her a leader in the MAHA movement, at least at the state level, and she has appeared on the WSITY podcast with Del Bigtree in which standard issue antivax disinformation was promulgated, including old antivax tropes about “vaccinated vs. unvaccinated” and the supposedly “suppressed” Henry Ford Study that was in reality just a bad study:
Let’s just say that being friendly with Del Bigtree indicates that, at minimum, rabid antivax stances don’t bother you. More likely, you are antivax. For one thing, perusal of the transcript of the podcast suggests that she does appear to buy into the “no saline placebo controlled studies” lie. There were even false claims likening vaccine mandates to being a violation of the Nuremberg Code, a very old antivax trope.
So what is Dr. Wang’s take on the panel including public health scientists and MAHA activists? She starts out:
“Each person shared a story about what drew them into this work. Listening, I found myself toggling between two lenses: one grounded in communication, the other in public health research. Through that first lens, something stood out immediately: The MAHA speakers were strong storytellers.
One speaker began: “I grew up in Appalachia, and my community is often referred to as the bedrock of the opioid crisis.””
“I was hooked — and so was the rest of the room. She described how the opioid epidemic had devastated members of her family and community, and how rural areas like hers face overlapping barriers to health: limited health care access, lack of healthy food, and economic disinvestment. She spoke about traveling for work and struggling to find healthier food options beyond “a bottle of water and a box of graham crackers.” She didn’t cite studies or statistics, and she didn’t have to.
Her story connected the dots: the opioid crisis, distrust of pharmaceutical companies, lack of access to health care and healthy food common to both rural and urban communities across the U.S., and the search for alternatives that are affordable and accessible. In a matter of minutes, she built a narrative that felt cohesive, human, and urgent — the kind that invites people not just to understand, but to feel.”
My reaction to reading the passage above was simple. It must be acknowledged that many MAHA activists didn’t come into the movement because of vaccines, and that it is certainly possible that Ms. Frost and Mr. Everitt are two such MAHA activists. Here’s the problem. Downplaying the extreme antivax viewpoint that birthed MAHA has been an intentional ploy ever since RFK Jr. first published his Wall Street Journal editorial in 2024 in which he coined the MAHA slogan. As I observed at the time, the original twelve-point plan laid out in RFK Jr.’s WSJ editorial intentionally sidestepped the issue of vaccines, noting further that nowhere in his MAHA manifesto does “RFK Jr. mention vaccines, not even once,” something that didn’t go unnoticed by his antivax followers, even immediately. Tech bro turned antivax activist Steve Kirsch, for instance, noticed. So did a number of RFK Jr.’s other antivax allies. Indeed, in recent months, MAHA has been becoming increasingly unhappy with President Trump and RFK Jr. because it’s been reported that the White House, noting how very, very unpopular RFK Jr.’s antivax moves have been over the last 14 months, has told him to cool it on vaccines until after the midterm elections—and he has! MAHA unhappiness has reached the point where President Trump felt the need to try to mollify MAHA leaders in a closed-door session. A huge part of the reason why MAHA is unhappy is because its believers perceive that RFK Jr. has not acted fast enough to get rid of COVID vaccines (and other vaccines), although in fairness they were also very angry that President Trump decided to allow increased production of Bayer’s Roundup weed killer.
Indeed, I’ve long argued that the main purpose of the MAHA movement is to provide a mantle under which RFK Jr.’s rabidly antivax agenda could hide, mostly disappearing under much more popular initiatives, such as promoting healthier food and water and encouraging Americans to exercise. (Yes, I know that a lot of what is being promoted in the name of addressing “chronic disease” and “diet” is quackery, particularly the functional medicine quackery preferred by our nominee for Surgeon General, Casey Means, but let’s, for the moment, accept this frame—for purposes of discussion only.) Moreover, MAHA is a movement that can be used as a recruiting tool for the antivax movement. As I used to say about opposition to vaccine mandates, “Come for the freedom, stay for the antivax,” in this case I’d repurpose it to say something like: “Come for addressing chronic disease, stay for the antivax.” Again, Dr. Wang’s take seems utterly oblivious to something that has been completely obvious to those of us combating antivax disinformation for a long time.
Part of Mr. Everitt’s post shows the divide:
My arrival at the hotel ahead of the conference had me wondering if I had made the right choice. These were the adversaries who had frustrated me during the pandemic. Despite my disappointment with the Trump administration on a host of issues, I still believe that MAHA is a good movement and that public health and health care in general need a wholesale revision if they are ever to become trusted institutions again. I also realized that many in the room were likely the unfortunate recipients of the cuts that the Trump administration, under RFK Jr.’s leadership, had implemented. I felt an uneasiness about standing up in front of a room that, in all likelihood, saw my advocacy for Kennedy as part of their own moment of tumult.
The next morning, on my way down to the lobby to get coffee, I walked past former NIH Director Francis Collins. I recognized him instantly and couldn’t help but trace my thoughts to Covid and all of the nefarious stories I associated him with. For a moment, the scenes of lockdowns and vaccine mandates all flashed in my head. I don’t belong at this conference, I told myself.
I’d have probably agreed that he probably didn’t belong at that conference, although in retrospect maybe he did. Note, however, that Mr. Everitt has clearly been ensconced in the conspiracy theories about Dr. Collins and Anthony Fauci, as well as all the COVID-19 misinformation that was promoted during the pandemic. This is another important point to consider. MAHA might be in part a grassroots movement, but in reality it is a movement that was spawned by the ruthless, constant, and intentional promotion of right-wing anti-public health and antivaccine messaging that reached a crescendo during the pandemic, but a crescendo that never really faded as the danger did.
I know that the antivax movement was once considered a left-wing movement, but, as I’ve related time and time again, along with the history of the rightward shift of the political center of the antivax, now MAHA, movement, that time was long past four years ago. Be that as it may, failure to acknowledge this reality is a blindspot. You can rebuild trust all you like with the odd individual MAHA activist here and there or smaller groups of MAHA activists, but as long as the misinformation flows so copiously from the firehose at the top, funded by a whole ecosystem of dark money groups, that trust will be short-lived. It is, after all, against the interest of the leaders of MAHA for MAHA believers to trust science-based public health and medicine. Rebuilding such trust would seriously cut into the ability of MAHA gurus like Casey Means and Peter McCullough to sell unproven supplements.
This brings me to what was perhaps the most cringeworthy part of Dr. Wang’s op-ed:
“Through my second lens of public health, that moment was both uncomfortable and clarifying. Uncomfortable, because parts of the movement, particularly around vaccines, run counter to established scientific evidence. It also exposed a gap we don’t often name: Public health has not always been as effective at translating evidence into visible, tangible change in people’s daily lives. And clarifying, because I realized that what MAHA has built, in a relatively short time, is social capital.”
“Parts of the movement… run counter to established scientific evidence”? “Particularly around vaccines”? That’s like the proverbial, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show?” Going against established science is the very raison d’être behind MAHA, particularly when it comes to vaccines. That’s part of the reason why MAHA feels so obligated to cloak their pseudoscience and opposition to science-based public health and medicine, using exaggerated terms such as “gold standard science” to describe what they want to do.
After correctly discussing the importance of social capital and how MAHA has built such capital up more effectively than public health, Dr. Wang concludes:
“That panel conversation at the conference didn’t change my commitment to evidence-based public health. But it did expand how I think about our work and the importance and possibility of finding common ground. In the sciences, communication is often treated as secondary, something to layer on after the research is done.
But sometimes, communication is the work.”
Congratulations, Captain Obvious. It’s not as though science communicators haven’t been saying this all along for decades. It’s not as though I haven’t read article after article over the years by well-meaning public health scientists saying the same thing. Another key point that Dr. Wang points out is how important stories are, how stories trump (excuse the use of the word) evidence almost every time. Again, Captain Obvious, this is nothing that science communicators haven’t been saying all along, going back two decades, when I first started countering antivax misinformation on my first blog, and beyond. Indeed, public health has long realized that stories are more effective tools for persuasion than dry data and scientific studies and lamented antivaxxers’ ability to come up with more compelling stories because they are not constrained by the truth. Don’t believe me? Here’s an example of a peer-reviewed article addressing the use of stories to combat antivax misinformation. It was published in 2013. Here’s a website devoted to stories of people suffering from vaccine-preventable diseases.
The bottom line is that vaccine and public health advocates have long understood the power of stories. So does Dr. Wang, who used her STAT News article to promote her book, The Collective Cure, which describes how storytelling can be used to promote evidence-based solutions. (I don’t begrudge her that, and hopefully it’s a good book.) The devil, of course, is in the details. An even bigger devil is: How does a science-based perspective penetrate the bubble of misinformation and disinformation that MAHA activists and believers live in? Stories can help, but if we can’t disseminate the stories nearly as well as the social media ecosystem captured by MAHA, how do we break through?
I’m not saying that there isn’t hope. For one thing, Mr. Everitt exults in just being listened to, and there is a potential lesson here:
But when the plenary session began, I sensed something really amazing: The room wanted to listen to what my fellow MAHA advocates and I had to say. I am certain that the skeptics were scattered amongst the masses, but as we discussed the challenges of public health interfacing with MAHA and the Kennedy leadership at HHS, the room seemed earnest, willing to hear what was being said.
It wasn’t a debate, and I wasn’t there to convince anyone that what I was saying should become the new gospel of health. But I could see in the eyes of many in the crowd an acknowledgement that what had happened over the past decade, particularly because of the pandemic, needed to be addressed.
We spoke for an hour, and when it was over, many audience members gathered around the stage to talk to my MAHA colleagues and me and find out more. I was thrilled to see it. No angry, in-your-face, Twitter-like battles were instigated. There was a real sense that we should be learning from one another in this moment, rather than building our bulwarks.
Far be it from me to argue that this is a bad thing, at least in this one case. Here’s the thing. You have to distinguish between listening to the foot soldiers, the rank and file, of MAHA who aren’t diehard antivaxxers and “listening” to the cranks, quacks, and grifters who lead the movement. There is utility in the former, because listening can potentially lead them back to trusting science-based public health. There is no utility in the latter, other than to educate yourself on the latest antivax talking points. You are not going to change their minds.
Moving on, if you believe Mr. Everitt, there is nothing that he wants more than to be able to trust medicine again:
In my most honest of moments, what I want from the medical community is the chance to trust it again. We need medicine to function in all the glory of its artistry. Patient care is one of the most necessary and humane interactions in all of humanity. So its politicization has been the worst possible outcome to a choose-your-own-adventure that never had to find its way down paths of distrust.
I so want to believe him here. However, I’m not sure that Mr. Everitt isn’t deluding himself. As I’ve written about many, many times, MAHA is at its heart a “choose your own adventure”-sort of medical ideology, which is likely precisely why Mr. Everitt was attracted to it in the first place. It emphasizes the primacy of the individual as the sole arbiter of ensuring individual health, screw public health. Indeed, it goes beyond that into a philosophy that can only be described as health as a result of personal virtue, with its frequent messaging that you—yes, you!—are completely in control of your own health. What flows from that messaging is the idea that if you are healthy, you must be living the “correct”—or virtuous—lifestyle.
Unfortunately, what also flows from the belief that health is solely the purview of the individual is a “blame the victim” attitude in which, if you are not healthy, then clearly it’s your fault for not having lived a sufficiently virtuous lifestyle, for not having eaten the right diet, for not having exercised enough, for not taking the right supplements. This is where we get into social Darwinism and even soft eugenics. If it’s your fault for being sick, according to MAHA, then why on earth should society pay to take care of you? You can also see soft eugenics in the messaging that infectious diseases like measles only kill children who are unhealthy and that the healthy (i.e., the virtuous) have nothing to fear from these diseases, messaging that during the pandemic was applied to COVID-19. More than that, the suffering is said to make you stronger—virtue, again!—with permanent lifelong “natural immunity,” unlike the supposedly “unnatural” and inferior immunity that comes from vaccines. In fact, with its emphasis on health as a result of personal “health virtue,” MAHA very much resembles prosperity gospel teaching, and that is not a coincidence, because prosperity theology emphasizes wealth and health as manifestations of virtue making a believer favored of God.
And MAHA leaders are the privileged who are favored by God. Most lower-level MAHA activists and believers are not so privileged, but they nonetheless buy into the ideology.
The way forward
The first thing that must be understood is that MAHA is nothing more than a manifestation of RFK Jr.’s worldview, laundered for “respectability” politically and for consumption by the mainstream. That is why MAHA soft-pedals RFK Jr.’s antivax beliefs, in particular how he is most definitely coming for your vaccines and doing everything he can to eliminate as many vaccines as possible during his time in office. That being said, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t common areas shared by MAHA and public health that, besides being good public health policy, might peel some MAHA adherents away. I say this looking at Mr. Everitt’s original version of the post and part that was edited out of the version published in STAT:
The last few weeks have been nothing but discouraging for those of us who are watching the generational political coalition that Donald Trump gathered together in the election of 2024, be dismantled by a war, a silly executive order on glyphosate, and a myriad of other mistakes, blunders and undoings that the Trump administration seems to be either fumbling their way through or willfully marching toward. I’d be lying if I said that my heart hasn’t been bent towards repentance for my part in the whole thing. I helped champion Bobby Kennedy as a campaign volunteer, and when he joined up with Trump, I reluctantly, yet calculatingly, decided that the tradeoffs were worth what I believed Mr. Kennedy could advocate for within the walls of a Trump White House.
I will always adore Bobby Kennedy for his scrappy presidential run. From the moment he signed on as a Democratic candidate, I was overwhelmed with a want and desire to help him win the presidency. I thought he was the only way to restore a sane approach to the democratic process, and after the Democrats trounced him out of the primary process, his independent candidacy gave him the most runway to tell people the truth about what he thought would be the best fixes for a very sick and broken nation. Yet, the last few weeks and months have been hard to muster up a smile about what is going on. I have hung on to Mr. Kennedy’s words at his campaign suspension event that he wanted the chance to argue and debate robustly with President Trump, especially on the things they disagreed about, but I was the fool for thinking the American bafoonery of thespianism, that supposedly passes for the governance of a nation, would ever allow for such a dynamism.
So you can see that Mr. Everitt is already unhappy with what MAHA has accomplished thus far and even feels betrayed. This sense comes across much more strongly in the original Substack version of the article than it does in the version edited down to fit within the space constraints imposed by STAT News. He goes on and on about how it is the system that is broken and how public health scientists are not MAHA’s enemy, although he can’t resist a dig or two about how they work for the government. Then there is this passage:
But that room I was in was filled with the people who can make the outcomes I — we all — want. They are the ones who are interfacing with the most downtrodden of our society, with the emergencies of bad choices, and the extraction that our mercantile system perpetuates and celebrates in its boardrooms.
Those advocates are the ones who have to sit with a forlorn woman from Mississippi and try to help her understand what is happening to her body, and why she’s feeling sick. They are the ones who have to try to educate people about junk food and processed fillers that are destroying their metabolisms and impeding their full flourishing capabilities. They are the ones who have to try to explain why it is their Medicare or Medicaid won’t help them pay for the preventive measures they would benefit from, but only will allow them the money they need for a pill or a procedure once the disease has progressed too far. These are the ground troops for a war that must be won, and MAHA needs them.
During the discussion, emergency physician Craig Spencer asked for a show of hands.
“Who wants to eliminate processed foods for their children?”
“Who wants toxins to be out of our water and food supply?”
“Who wants good access to healthy, whole foods?”
There wasn’t a hand that didn’t raise.
The people of MAHA want those same things. They don’t want Kennedy relegated and boxed into a corner, simply playing with his food dyes. The people of MAHA actually want a government that acts as a watchdog against the enrichment of corporations by the extraction of human capital through their cycles of drug-chasing-drug remediation.
It is not a surprise to anyone involved in science-based public health that public health scientists want to decrease the consumption of highly processed foods, to remove toxins from water and food, to assure access to healthy food to the population. However, MAHA itself has painted public health as being opposed to—or at least indifferent to—these things. Where there might be a wedge to make some MAHA believers start to question MAHA while finding common ground with public health goes back to a huge disconnect at the heart of MAHA, something Mr. Everitt seems to recognize, even if he doesn’t say so explicitly. One part of that wedge is how, other than RFK Jr.’s crusade against vaccines, this administration is not only not doing anything beyond the performative (e.g, eliminating some food dyes) to make MAHA’s stated goals into policy, but it’s actively implementing policies contrary to what MAHA claims to want, such as allowing the use of glyphosate and loosening environmental regulations governing pollution and clean water.
Another part is to go back to what Dr. Wang wrote about what surely must have been Ms. Frost’s account of how she became MAHA in which she discussed the lack of access to health care and healthy food common to both rural and urban communities across the U.S. and the search for alternatives that are affordable and accessible. What, I would ask, are President Trump and HHS Secretary doing to address these problems? Nothing! Worse than nothing, actually! They are cutting funds to Medicare and Medicaid in order to fund the war in Iran. Those cuts will endanger the viability of the rural hospitals that are, as Ms. Frost knows, already grossly insufficient to meet the massive healthcare needs of rural populations. Worse, the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz is likely to make food more expensive because not just oil is being bottled up. Fertilizer currently can’t get through, either. President Trump’s tariffs are hurting farmers, the end result of which will be—you guessed it—more expensive food. Decreasing access to vaccines will make children, particularly poor children, sicker. (I know, I know, the antivax contingent won’t buy that, but maybe those in MAHA who came to the movement for reasons other than vaccines might.)
As epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina put it:
There’s a real difference between the leadership of MAHA, like RFK Jr., and the grassroots supporters drawn to the movement.
I don’t believe RFK Jr. is acting in good faith. His record is riddled with contradictions and falsehoods. His tactics often erode trust under the guise of restoring it. Treating him as a serious partner would be a mistake.
But many people who support MAHA at the grassroots level are asking real, good-faith questions. They’re responding to gaps and failures that public health professionals recognize, too.
Indeed, I would argue that, from a “gold standard science” standpoint, the single most effective strategy to address chronic disease, as MAHA claims to be all about, would be to institute universal government-funded health insurance and that, if you truly want to improve the diets of poor people in Appalachia (or anywhere else, such as urban areas with food desserts) the most effective policy would be to increase food assistance benefits and institute policies that actually encourage the production of healthier food and address the existence of food deserts that lack stores selling fresh food. (Hint: Just removing a few food dyes ain’t such a policy, and close to 13% of the US population lives in food deserts.) If you really want to encourage more people to be more active, then policies mandating more walkable spaces in cities and suburbs would be one way to go. Is this administration doing any of these things? Of course not! Quite the opposite, in fact!
Once again, it is undeniably true that MAHA was birthed from the antivax movement. MAHA is antivax, and nearly all antivaxxers now appear to be MAHA. This is a huge problem that, for whatever reason, Dr. Wang doesn’t acknowledge other than very tangentially. Mr. Everitt, for his part, doesn’t even acknowledge it at all in the STAT News version of his article, likely due to a combination of intent and editorial control. (He does rail against vaccine mandates in his Substack post.) RFK Jr. doesn’t want to endanger the antivax focus of MAHA, except strategically and briefly. That explains why he is currently refusing to talk about vaccines in public, at least until after the midterms. The White House knows how unpopular his antivax stances are. None of this is stopping RFK Jr. from, for instance, pushing through a new charter to remake ACIP into a truly antivax committee by broadening the types of members who can be committed and adding antivax groups like Physicians for Informed Consent and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons as liaisons.
I’m sure that Ms. Frost, as a board member of a state-level MAHA organization, and Mr. Everitt, as a MAHA activist, know that the word from on high is to hide and deny the antivax rhetoric as much as possible, at least for the next six and a half months until the midterm elections. That very restraint enabled this messaging victory, with STAT News gamely providing the platform for two glowing op-eds about how MAHA and public health really might be able to work together if public health would just pay no attention to all the quackery and antivax at the heart of MAHA.
Still, there is enough potential here that something good might come of it. The problem is that the MAHA believers don’t appreciate that MAHA is, at its heart, an ideology that can only work for you (barring another pandemic) if you are privileged and have sufficient resources to pay for what it advocates. They further don’t appreciate that they are not among the privileged few. If more of them could be persuaded to understand that, they might be reachable by a science-based public health approach. The problem is that MAHA and science-based public health can never just “get along” as long as the antivax and quackery at the heart of MAHA are not acknowledged and addressed in whatever dialogue between MAHA and public health there is that might tackle shared interests. Any article that fails to acknowledge the disinformation ecosystem that created MAHA, how MAHA was spawned by RFK Jr. as a title to wrap his antivax beliefs in, the better to hide them under the banner of “chronic disease,” better diet, more exercise, and a hostility to big pharma is missing a huge part of the point.