The relationship between Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, is a strange one, limned in irony, loaded with contradictions.

The two men arose from opposite ends of the American political spectrum: one, the heir to a New York real estate empire, whose father’s ruthless exploits were immortalized in folk icon Woody Guthrie’s 1951 song “Old Man Trump,” and whose two presidential victories are widely viewed as a stark rebuke to the American left wing.

The other, originally an environmental lawyer who is the scion of a family that’s practically synonymous with American mid-century liberalism.

In an odd and uniquely American twist of political fate, RFK Jr. rose to high office under the wing of arguably the most right-wing president the country has ever elected. What’s more, Kennedy now has jurisdiction over the most enduring legacy of his uncle’s presidency: Medicare. Though JFK was assassinated before Medicare became law, his was the vision behind it, and he pushed it to the fore of domestic policy in the early 1960s.

On RFK Jr.’s watch, the Medicare and Medicaid programs, along with almost everything else under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), will likely undergo the biggest fiscal and operational overhauls in their collective history.

Maverick Bromance

Since last Fall, Kennedy and Trump have been so friendly, it’s easy to forget that when Kennedy was running to challenge Trump — initially as a Democrat, then as an independent — he was among the chorus likening Trump to Hitler and calling his supporters “outright Nazis.” His tone, obviously, changed once he joined the team.

For all their obvious differences, the two men do have a few things in common: both come from immense wealth, and both crashed into politics from far outside conventional party lines, with stances that upend traditional political discourse. Both see government as fundamentally flawed, and have attracted legions of Americans who feel similarly.

Trump and Kennedy delight in controversial positions that run counter to consensus, and both like to project strength and fearlessness in the face of criticism. Oh, and they’re both media masters, despite oft-voiced contempt for it.

Call it a maverick bromance.

Many advocates of holistic and functional medicine, along with leaders in the dietary supplement industry, see RFK Jr.’s ascent as a long-sought transformational moment, the tipping point that so many of the holistic movement’s visionaries predicted decades ago.

The MAHA Tipping Point?

HHS has an annual budget of roughly $2 trillion, 85% of which is mandatory spending, meaning that it must be spent on the actual healthcare and social services for which it was allocated. At least on paper, Kennedy is now positioned to shift levers of power and money in favor of a more holistic, less pharma-fixated mindset across HHS agencies.

RFK, Jr. views supplements, herbs, and psychedelics kindly. He has loudly pointed out that as a nation we are staggering under a burden of chronic cardiometabolic, autoimmune, and psychosocial ills, most of which are driven by diet, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Our system is heavily biased toward costly pharmaceutical and surgical fixes, yet our extravagant healthcare spending has not improved our scores on key public health metrics. In fact, most numbers point the opposite way.

Kennedy contends that conventional medical orthodoxy is a big part of the problem, and he advocates a full-on challenge to many of mainstream medicine’s core tenets. This has won him a dedicated following of “MAHA moms” and others who cherish his vaccine skepticism, criticism of mandates, and insistence on personal health liberty.

But Kennedy has also drawn equally strong animus from many in the medical and public health sphere who view him as a dangerous proponent of anti-science who could, potentially, undo more than a century’s worth of public health progress. Even within the holistic, naturopathic, and functional medicine world, there are many who share this tempered view, agreeing with some basic MAHA tenets but questioning Kennedy’s more extreme stances.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the Kennedy-Trump dynamics play out in the months to come because in many ways, the MAHA vision is at odds with the MAGA agenda. The two movements that aligned in large part for political expediency, are very likely to clash.

The contradictions inherent in the MAHA-MAGA alliance are on display in the recent MAHA Report on children’s health issued by HHS on May 22.

In many ways, these contradictions are even more troublesome, though less headline-grabbing, than the MAHA committee’s carelessness with research citations (we’ll get to that in a minute).

Pro-Health vs Pro-Growth

The report states that: “During this administration, we will begin reversing the childhood chronic disease crisis by confronting its root causes—not just its symptoms. This means pursuing truth, embracing science, and enacting pro-growth policies and innovations to restore children’s health.”

By “pro-growth,” the authors do not mean childhood development milestones. They mean economic growth. And therein lies the rub.

The MAHA Report goes to great lengths to show how corporate malfeasance — manifesting as junk food, environmental toxins, and overuse of pharmaceuticals — are the main drivers of childhood chronic disease. But those very trends have been extremely profitable. They’ve driven massive growth for food, ag, and pharma companies, and also for those who’ve invested in them.

The report insists that the staggering morbidity plaguing American kids is the result of “corporate capture” — a term the MAHA committee uses repeatedly to describe how profit-hungry industries have manipulated public policy for their own gain.

At the same time though, the committee decries “European-style” regulatory systems that stifle economic growth and overburden industries.

But let’s be real: changing the alarming children’s health trends would require major changes in industry behavior. Change on that scale doesn’t just happen. It requires a combination of grassroots consumer pressures, sustained public education, and strong federal and state regulation. It costs money upfront, and it often curtails growth.

Think about the decades-long effort to curb smoking. It didn’t happen because the tobacco industry read the lung cancer data, saw the light, and changed its ways. It resulted from fierce federal, state, and local regulation, combined with ongoing education efforts, sales taxes, and — let’s not forget — a ban on cigarette ads on TV.

Given that the GOP’s political DNA doesn’t contain a lot of genes for constraining big business, and that the Trump administration is making good on its promise to “reform” (some would say “destroy”) the regulatory agencies overseeing healthcare, environmental policy, and commerce, I’m left wondering how the MAHA visionaries intend to actualize the noble goals they articulate.

A Guidance Document

The MAHA Report is a 72-page document commissioned under President Trump’s Executive order 14212, calling for an advisory to “assist the President on how best to exercise his authority to address the childhood chronic disease crisis.”

The initial report is a comprehensive assessment of childhood chronic disease trends in the U.S. It chronicles the troubling rises in obesity, diabetes, asthma, depression, autism, ADHD, and autoimmune disease, and it names four main drivers: ultra-processed foods, environmental toxin exposure, over-medication, and overuse of technology.

The executive order obliges the committee to issue a second document later this year, outlining policy initiatives and practical strategies to address the myriad problems outlined in the first report. 

Sloppy Citations

Days after the MAHA Report was published, journalists Emily Kennard and Margaret Manto, reporting for NOTUS, revealed that several key studies spotlighted in the report simply do not exist — while others are improperly linked, or inaccurately cited. Bigger media outlets like the Washington Post, New York Times, and The Guardian, amplified the NOTUS report.

Senate Democrats quickly seized on the errors, questioning not only the credibility of the MAHA Report, but also RFK Jr.’s fitness to lead HHS. Maryland Senator Angela Alsobrooks demanded a resignation. “Making up ‘scientific studies’ to further prove your conspiracy theories is disqualifying. RFK must resign,” Alsobrooks told NOTUS.

Other critics point out that the MAHA committee actually met only once, that the document is a product of foregone conclusions, and that chatbots likely had as much to do with it as actual expert deliberation.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt waived off the criticisms, attributing the non-existent or misidentified papers to “formatting issues.” She said the errors will be corrected in a forthcoming updated version, but added that none of the mistakes “negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that’s ever been released by the federal government.”

Citation sloppiness looks bad, coming as it does from HHS. It certainly doesn’t square well with the MAHA Report’s repeated insistence that healthcare be guided by “gold standard” science. It makes a lousy first impression that only reinforces doubt among RFK’s detractors.

Troubling Trends

All that said, the MAHA Report gets a lot of things right. It correctly points out that the U.S. spends more than twice as much per capita on healthcare as other industrialized nations, yet our life expectancy is down at the bottom, and most if not all of our childhood health indicators are far below average.

It chronicles the steady rises in childhood obesity, cardiometabolic risk, and autoimmune diseases over the last half-century, along with the soaring costs of treating an ever-increasing number of sick kids. Here’s a smattering of troubling stats:

• Over 40% of the roughly 73 million U.S. children (age 0-17 years) have at least one chronic disease, according to the CDC.
• Over 75% of American teens and young adults are ineligible for military service due to obesity, poor physical fitness, and/or mental health problems.
• More than 1 in 5 children over age 6 are obese — a 270% increase since the 1970s, when the figure was 1 in 20. U.S. childhood obesity prevalence is more than double that of other G7 nations.
• More than 350,000 American children have diabetes (3.5 per 1,000), and epidemiologists predict a 600% increase in childhood type 2 by 2060 if present trends continue.
• Autism impacts 1 in 31 children by age 8, according to the CDC.
• 1 in 4 American children has allergies, including seasonal allergies, eczema, and food allergies. Eczema (atopic dermatitis) and skin allergy prevalence in kids under 18 increased from 7.4% in 1997-1999, to 12.7% from 2016-2018. During the same period, childhood food-allergy prevalence rose by 88%.
• Celiac disease increased 5-fold since the 1980s. Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), including Crohn’s, rose by 25% over the last decade.
• Over 10% of children have been diagnosed with ADHD, with approximately 1 million more diagnosed in 2022 compared to 2016. Suicides among 10- to 24-year-olds increased by 62% from 2007 to 2021, making it the second leading cause of death in teens aged 15-19.

Again, one might find fault with particular stats. But on the whole, it is difficult to dismiss the report’s general conclusion that the kids are definitely not alright.

Ultra-Processed, Ultra-Problem

The MAHA authors stress the connection between poor diet and childhood illness, with an intensive focus on “ultra-processed” foods (UPF). Though there is no universally-accepted definition of UPF, the MAHA Report uses the Nova food classification system’s definition: “industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients including sugar, oils, fats and salt, and food substances of no or rare culinary use.”

Highly processed (and highly palatable), ready-made, high-sugar, low-nutrient foods are extremely popular. The MAHA Committee repeatedly states that UPFs now make up nearly 70% of the average American kid’s total calories, and 50% of the total diets of pregnant and postpartum moms. Roughly half of all kids aged 2-18 years never eat actual unprocessed fruit on any given day.

UPFs pile on calories, but fail to deliver vitamins, minerals, or fiber. They also tweak children’s (and adults’) brain reward pathways and satiety hormones in ways that favor over-consumption, faster consumption, and repeated consumption. This ultimately leads to elevated glucose and insulin levels, while damaging the gut microbiome.

And then there are the additives. The MAHA Report states that there are over 2,500 food additives in common use, including emulsifiers, sweeteners, binders, colorings, preservatives, and flavorings. Most have never been tested for long-term safety in humans, yet some have been linked, at least epidemiologically, to increased risk of cognitive problems, ADHD, CVD, metabolic disorders, and some forms of cancer.

The report specifically calls out Red 40, titanium dioxide, propylparaben, butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), aspartame, sucralose, and saccharin. Kennedy has already announced plans to ban many food dyes and other additives. How those bans will be enforced remains to be seen.

Corporate Capture

The MAHA Committee ultimately places a large share of the blame on “the consolidation of the food system.”

The rising consumption of UPFs “corresponded with a pattern of corporatization and consolidation in our food system,” they write. The trend gathered steam in the 1980s and accelerated in the 90s, as large food and ag companies acquired smaller ones, and then began acquiring or merging with each other to the point where a handful of mega-corps like PepsiCo, Archer Daniels Midland, Tyson, and Nestle now have near-total control over all levels of food production, distribution, and marketing.

As the food conglomerates grew, so did their influence on agricultural, food, and health policy. The authors repeatedly point out that most research on foods, food additives, and diet-health connections is funded by major food corporations which also have tremendous lobbying power in Washington.

The MAHA authors spare no vitriol toward Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Drug. They’re equally generous in their praise of American farmers, who are “the backbone of America,” who “feed the world,” and who must be “put at the center of how we think about health.”

Of Food & Farmers

The MAHA Report laments the fact that, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, American farmers actually received only 16 cents of every food dollar spent in 2023, the other 84 cents going to processors, distributors, marketers, and retailers. They hold a special reverence for small, independent, organic family farmers and ranchers.

Though organic food production has grown steadily over the last 20 years, it is still a minute slice of the agricultural pie. According to USDA data, there were 17,445 certified organic farms in the U.S. in 2021, out of a total of 1.9 million farms. That’s less than 1%.

Organic farms are roughly 4.9 million farmland acres, about 0.5% of the nation’s total.

Despite their relatively small footprint, certified organic farms contribute significantly to the ag economy. In 2021, they generated $11.2 billion in sales, about 5% of total food sales that year. That’s largely because organic products carry premium price tags. They’re popular with affluent people who can afford to pay extra, but they’re out of reach for many who live on tight budgets.

The MAHA authors rightly note that the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), and other regulations impose odious compliance requirements that small family farms are less able to meet. Much like independent private practice clinicians, independent farmers rarely have the resources or staff to deal effectively with burdensome paperwork.

Organic certification is expensive and many small farms simply lack the money to obtain and maintain certification. This locks them out of the premium market for certified organic food, and hobbles growth of organic farming.

“The greatest step the United States can take to reverse childhood chronic disease is to put whole foods produced by American farmers and ranchers at the center of healthcare,” the authors state.

Love-Hate with ‘Europe’

The MAHA Committee lavishes high praise on France, where “schools are required to source half their products from local sources and prohibit vending machines.” Likewise, “Japanese schools typically prepare meals on-site using whole ingredients, often from local farms and school gardens.” Similarly, Nordic countries insist that school lunches contain plenty of unprocessed produce while strictly limiting high-fat, high-sugar, and high-sodium processed foods. That’s a stark contrast to the norms here in the U.S.

But here’s where the MAHA schizophrenia kicks in.

Japan, France, and the Nordic nations all have strong central governments and strict — some would say “burdensome” — regulations on agriculture, food processing, and food labeling. They also have reliable, if imperfect, national healthcare systems. Their citizens pay high taxes in exchange for relatively robust social safety nets. In short, they’re the very sort of “socialist nanny states” that many MAHA supporters hold in contempt, and which the MAGA movement absolutely vilifies. 

The MAHA authors are quite selective when referencing European virtues and values. They applaud European investment in healthy school lunches and commitment to organic artisanal agriculture, and lament the sizable gaps between U.S. health scores and those of European nations. Yet they dismiss or ignore all the “European-style” public policies that account for those differences. 

The Texas Tussle

There’s a similar set of contradictory impulses inherent in the recent Make Texas Healthy Again legislation — a sort of state-level “mini-MAHA” championed by Texas Senator Lois Kolkhorst.

Among other things, the law requires all packaged foods sold in Texas to include warning labels disclosing artificial coloring agents, preservatives, additives, or other chemicals that have been banned in Canada, the U.K., or the E.U.

It’s the sort of move one would expect from a left-leaning, regulation-happy state like California — which is pursuing its own state-level effort to purge UPFs from school meals — but not from Texas, with its longstanding disdain for government interference in commerce, education, or medical practice. It seems downright out of character for Texas Republicans like Kolkhorst, Senate President Dan Patrick, and other GOP’ers to suddenly be interested in what E.U. regulators are banning. Clearly, times are changing.

In many ways, Texas is a test-kitchen for the practical implementation of MAHA. Already we’re seeing that the movement’s high ideals clash with the grinding reality of business. In late May, the Texas house of representatives forwarded an amendment that exempts dietary supplement products from the labeling requirements.

The new rules met major pushback from industry trade groups, as well as beverage makers and retailers. Objections included concerns over cost of compliance, the potential for major labeling complications as individual states stipulate their own regs in the absence of a unified national system, and a sense that supplements were being unfairly lumped together with junk foods.

The industry’s objections are understandable. Supplement makers are already contending with widespread uncertainty over tariffs, supply chain disruptions, shaky consumer spending, and intense downward price pressure at retail. The last thing anybody wants is a set of new and odious state regs — however well-intentioned — that will suck time, cost money, and possibly dent sales.

But if outcry from supplement makers was enough to deflect the new Texas labeling rules, what’s going to happen on the national level if — no, make that when — Big Ag and Big Food weigh in against whatever new rules the MAHA movement proposes? 

Rockwell vs Reality

The MAHA Report presents a Rockwell-esque vision of rosy-cheeked family farmers producing wholesome fruits and vegetables for happy, healthy kids at local public schools.

But our current reality is that most school food programs — like most hospital food programs — are administered by massive companies like Aramark and Sysco. They purchase commodity output of industrial farms that monocrop pesticide-laden GMO staples, and CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) that churn out antibiotic-drenched meat and dairy.

At home, far too many kids eat highly processed yet tasty goop extruded by major corporations and wrapped in seductive colors that tap primal brain circuitry. Harried parents, struggling to make ends meet in a precarious economy, lack the time, money, and energy to shop for and prepare healthy, wholesome meals. 

How can we possibly move from this status quo to MAHA’s optimistic vision without massive top-to-bottom policy changes?

As the Texas experience already shows, industries — even ones like the supplement industry that play in the health and wellness space — are resistant to changing their ways, especially if it increases costs and hassles, and threatens sales.

WIC & SNAP

The MAHA Report criticizes many federal programs for complicity in the surge of childhood illness. But it does praise WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children), which provides food support for roughly 6.7 million women with young kids.

“WIC has a proven track record of improving children’s health,” they write. “WIC allows health-conscious food purchase that are adjusted according to participants’ life stage nutritional needs, including increased fruit and vegetable consumption, reductions in

juice consumption, and reductions in calorie intake.”

They’re less happy with SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which allows recipients to spend government dollars on UPFs, soda, and other garbage foods. Roughly 42 million Americans receive SNAP, which spent around $113 billion in 2023.

“Children receiving SNAP benefits are more likely to consume greater quantities of sugar-sweetened beverages and processed meats compared to income-eligible nonrecipients; by one estimate, nearly twice as much will be spent by SNAP on UPFs and sugar-sweetened beverages ($21 billion) compared to fruits and vegetables ($11 billion) in FY2025,” says the MAHA Report.

A Tufts University study showed that adult SNAP recipients are twice as likely to develop heart disease, three times more likely to die from diabetes, and have higher rates of metabolic disorders. Children on SNAP often fail to meet federal dietary guidelines — which are themselves subject to MAHA criticism — and they generally show lower scores on key health indicators compared with non-SNAP kids. But are these trends a reflection of SNAP or rather, consequences of poverty?

Some health advocates believe a campaign prohibiting use of SNAP dollars for soft drink purchases, is far more likely under Kennedy’s HHS. Over the last 20 years, legislators across the political spectrum have clamored for such a change, to no avail.

Other policy initiatives, such as a 2018 bipartisan effort to include basic vitamin and mineral supplements in SNAP, have similarly failed.

If Kennedy and the MAHA movement can actualize these sorts of policies, it would indeed be a blessing for the health of the nation’s children.

But all of this ignores the bigger question about the fate of WIC and SNAP under Trump. The administration’s 2025 budget calls for a $200 million cut in WIC funding. The program is already staggering from cuts under the 2023 House appropriations bill, which reduced WIC’s budget to $800 million below the requested amount.

According to the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, those 2023 cuts already resulted in major benefits reductions, including a 56% cut in cash value benefits for fruit and vegetable purchases for children aged 1-4, from $25 to $11 per child per month; a 70% reduction for pregnant and postpartum women (from $44 to $11); and a 69% cut for breastfeeding women (from $49 to $15).

On the SNAP side, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” proposes a $267 billion cut to the program, along with work requirements for able-bodied individuals, an enrollment limit of six members per family, and tighter income thresholds for enrollment.

The millions of people on federal food assistance aren’t likely to be buying organic produce from local family farms any time soon.

Confronting the Chemical Soup

I’ve focused here on the food component of the MAHA Report. But similar contradictions bedevil the report’s position on environmental toxins.

The MAHA Committee notes there are over 40,000 potentially toxic chemicals in wide use across a vast range of industries, and which can become air and/or water pollutants. Residues of pesticides, herbicides, and microplastics are showing up with increasing frequency in blood and urine samples from American children and pregnant women.

“Children are exposed to numerous chemicals, such as heavy metals, PFAS, pesticides, and, phthalates, via their diet, textiles, indoor air pollutants, and consumer products,” they write. “Children’s unique behaviors and developmental physiology make them particularly vulnerable to potential adverse health effects from these cumulative exposures, many of which have no historical precedent in our environment or biology.”

Leaving aside the question of whether the Committee played fair by including water fluoridation, viewed by many dentists and public health experts as a preventive measure, in its section on environmental toxins, the MAHA Report makes a solid case that today’s kids are exposed to unprecedented levels of potentially harmful chemicals about which we know little.

Few of these revelations are new. Environmental health advocates have been sounding these alarms for decades. What is new is that the MAHA movement has main-staged these issues, backed by the authority of HHS and major federal healthcare programs.

But again, guidance documents are one thing, reality is another. And the reality is that since January, the Trump administration has reversed decades’ worth of environmental regulations. It has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, curtailed the EPA’s authority, and fired many EPA employees. Specifically, the administration:

• Reversed a Biden-era ruling that would have set discharge limits on PFAS from factories;
• Began a comprehensive effort to scuttle many air quality regulations that limit air pollution from transportation and manufacture;
• Proposed elimination of the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board;
• Eliminated the Environmental Justice Grants program, which formerly funded roughly $100 million in cleanup initiatives in poor, at-risk communities;
• Cut CDC funding and staffing for environment-related programs, including a lead poisoning prevention program; and
• Proposed a 54.5% reduction of EPA’s total budget in 2026, cutting it from $9.1 billion to $4.2 billion — roughly what the agency was allocated in the mid 1980s.

And that’s only a handful of its actions in a mere 4 months.

MAHA advocates, including RFK Jr., may see environmental toxins as a serious children’s health concern. Judging from its actions so far, it seems that the Trump administration does not share this view.

The MAHA Report decries the corporate takeover of nutrition and toxicology research, yet the MAGA government is gutting most federal healthcare research agencies, cutting funding, and withholding medical research grants to universities as a means of forwarding other policy agendas. It has also alienated many scientists and researchers, including some who are doing the very sort of independent non-industry studies that the MAHA Report insists are vital.

If industry-funded research is compromised, government research is curtailed, and university research funding is subject to sudden politically-driven withdrawals, who exactly is going to do all the “gold standard” research for which the MAHA Report calls?

Culture Wars & The V Word

For the most part, the MAHA Report avoids inflammatory culture-war language, though in an obvious nod to Project 2025, it refers to gender-transition medical treatment as “Child Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” and asserts that “puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries,” carry significant risk of “irreversible effects.”

Here, the authors grab an opportunity to jab at several major medical organizations for supporting gender-transition treatments.

Speaking of jabs, the MAHA Report deftly pussyfoots around the subject of vaccines, the issue that brought RFK Jr. to national prominence, and the one about which he faces the most flak.

Folded into the section on “The Overmedicalization of Our Kids,” the committee’s vaccine comments begin: “Vaccines benefit children by protecting them from infectious diseases. But, as with any medicine, vaccines can have side effects that must be balanced against their benefits.”

The authors then say that the number of CDC-recommended vaccines for babies has increased since the mid 1980s from three to 29, though they include “in utero exposures from vaccines administered to the mother” in that tally. They claim the CDC list far exceeds the guidelines used by most European countries, yet nobody’s doing the international comparative studies on rates of vaccine-related adverse effects.

They point out that vaccines are the only class of pharma products for which all 50 states have some sort of mandate (though most states do still allow religious and/or personal exemptions), yet many vaccines on the CDC’s list were approved based on small studies with no inert placebos (the “gold standard” research method), and short safety monitoring periods.

Parents have questions and concerns. So do a lot of practitioners, says the Committee. They deserve answers. Yet the current biomedical status quo constrains the types of vaccine questions that can be researched, while efforts to combat “disinformation” are squelching open dialog.

In short, the report signals to MAHA supporters that it shares their vaccine criticisms and is willing to bring them to the halls of power, while avoiding categorically “anti-vax” statements.

But of course actions speak louder than words, and a mere 2 weeks after HHS published the MAHA Report, Kennedy force-retired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), and quickly replaced them with a panel of eight new advisors of his choosing.

The new panel includes Robert Malone, MD, who worked for years in mRNA technology research and drug development, before emerging as one of the most outspoken medical critics of the COVID vaccines — and the mandates for their widespread use.

Also on RFK’s new panel is psychiatrist/neurologist Joseph Hibbeln, who’s had a long and distinguished career researching omega-3 fatty acids and their impact on brain and neurological function. How that qualifies him for a vaccine advisory panel is anyone’s guess, however. Hibbeln has never published on vaccines, infectious diseases, or other relevant matters.

Other members of Kennedy’s panel, like Retsef Levi, an MIT professor of operations management, Swedish epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, and emergency medicine physician James Pagano, are all outspoken critics of the COVID vaccines, and of the mainstream public health response to the pandemic.

Kulldorff, who was fired by Harvard Medical School in 2024 after refusing to take a COVID vaccine, was a co-author, along with Jay Bhattacharya (now the director of NIH) of the Great Barrington Declaration. This 2020 document questioned the merits of lockdowns as a COVID containment strategy, and promoted an approach that would speed the development of herd immunity.

Kennedy justified the total purge-and-replace on grounds that the public has lost trust in the CDC’s vaccine experts, whom he claims are mired in pharma-funded conflicts of interest.

In their shared contempt for “establishment” medicine and academic expertise, Kennedy’s MAHA and Trump’s MAGA movements are well aligned. Kennedy’s ACIP moves are a clear signal of his intention to tear down bastions of conventional medicine, and that will certainly play well to MAGA supporters. 

It remains to be seen what sort of broader health policy recommendations the MAHA Committee will issue this Fall. Kennedy will undoubtedly have Trump’s support for measures that cut federal spending, curtail regulation, and unmake Biden- or Obama-era policies.

But what of policies that would require big federal spending, impose new regulations and requirements, and substantially impact corporate practices and profits? Those sorts of suggestions will likely meet with strong resistance from both the Trump administration and the industries that would be affected.

For all its praises of Europe’s admirable child health stats, artisanal school lunches, and more relaxed vaccine guidelines, the MAHA Committee stresses that the vision it holds “cannot happen through a European regulatory system that stifles growth.”

Rather, it asserts that the American formula for happy, healthy kids depends on “fearless gold-standard science throughout the federal government and through unleashing private sector innovation.”

We’ll have to wait for the Committee’s forthcoming policy report to find out what that means.

Read the MAHA Report. For all its flaws and drawbacks, it is an important document that articulates core principles of holistic, functional, and naturopathic medicine. For better and for worse, Kennedy and MAHA are putting those principles front and center in public discourse.

But read it with realistic expectations. As it moves from position statement to policy, the MAHA juggernaut could very well be dashed on MAGA’s jagged rocks.