Hijacking Health: MAHA’s Trojan Horse Strategy

How MAHA’s Safety Rhetoric Masks Regressive Policies and Medical Disinformation

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I spoke at the Association of Health Care Journalism (AHCJ) meeting this weekend in Los Angeles, which for me is a big honor, as I was not educated as a journalist. The session focused on my writing, both my books and The Vajenda, and was led by Maia Anderson, who asked many provocative questions.

I spoke about how I choose my topics, which is a combination of what I feel is important medically, what is trending on social media, what the traditional media is writing about (and often getting wrong), the impact of politics on women’s health, responses to health questions that I get here on The Vajenda, and sometimes just whatever I feel like writing about (hello Winter Vagina). One question many people may not know the answer to is how I came up with the name, The Vajenda? It is an homage to a sign from (I assume) a right-wing gun shop that was a crude attempt to insult Hillary Clinton and “warn” men about her, during the election of 2016.

I mean, vagenda of manocide? What an excellent name for an all-female punk band. And then, years later, when I was considering what to call this Substack, I realized, why go with Vagenda when Vajenda is right there!

During the Q&A for my talk, I answered a question from the audience about the MAHA movement and might they have some good ideas, and a variation of the same question was asked in another session. Both audiences seemed interested in the answers, so if it’s on the minds of several health journalists, I think it’s an important thread to pull.

I was asked (and I paraphrase because I wasn’t taking notes and I don’t have that kind of recall), “You've spoken about the harms of the Make America Healthy Again movement, but how do you reconcile the fact that some of the things they are asking for aren’t unreasonable?” The specific MAHA harms I was speaking of during my session were anti-medical abortion, anti-contraception, and anti-vaccine agendas, which are built on lies and distorted science, and spun into propaganda. The “not unreasonable” part was the call for a healthier food supply and fewer chemicals. In the other session, the speaker was asked the same thing, except his subject was about some discredited Alzheimer’s research, and the “good” part of MAHA was the call for transparency in research.

I get it. On the surface, some of what the MAHA movement is pointing out seems reasonable. But my argument against working with MAHA, or even taking them remotely seriously, is that these issues are a Trojan Horse. Kennedy and the MAHA movement have identified a few issues that the vast majority of people can agree on. For example, something about the Western diet and ultra-processed food is involved in obesity and cardiovascular disease. It’s also true that there is research fraud in medicine. But identifying and being serious about fixing in an evidence based manner are not the same thing

As far as a safer food ecosystem is concerned, Kennedy and the MAHA movement might claim they care, but their actions demonstrate they don’t. For example, the circus of taking red food dye number 40 out of the food supply. While that sounds like a good thing, what’s actually happened is they have hyped it up well beyond its actual significance, and then are banning it is a performative way to act like they are doing something while actually having no real impact on access to healthier foods. Keep in mind, Kennedy created an environment that pushed Dr. Kevin Hall, one of the world’s leading experts on ultra processed foods, to retire from the NIH. One of the egregious actions from the NIH was altering Dr. Hall’s answers in a press release to make them less in line with the actual science and more in line with pre-existing Kennedy beliefs. If the administration were sincerely invested in both food science and transparency, they would have increased Dr. Hall’s funding and not censored his words.

What does affect access to healthier foods? Poverty. What is the Trump administration proposing? Reducing eligibility under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Making it harder for people to get food, isn’t making anyone healthy again. As for saving children from chemicals, the Trump administration has cut tens of millions of dollars in grants to study the impact of pesticides, pollution, wildfire smoke, and forever chemicals on the food supply. How exactly is that cleaning up our food system?

And let’s talk some more about transparency. The session on Alzheimer’s was about the investigation behind the book Doctored, by Charles Piller, which uncovered significant fraud in what was considered seminal research (I’m reading it now, and will post a review if people are interested). Sadly, ethical misconduct happens, and it should be zero percent. Kennedy can call for transparency all he wants, but it is lip service because the recent White House Health Report released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referenced research papers that didn't exist and then the White House blamed that on document formatting!?!

How’s that for “restoring honesty and integrity in government?”

I understand that some people think they can, or want to believe they can, work with the current administration to salvage something, but this isn’t George W. Bush and PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. I disagreed with Bush on I am sure most things and he was horrible for reproductive rights. And yet, he was willing to listen to a world expert, Anthony Fauci, and make PEPFAR happen to save lives–an estimated 26 millions lives. The difference between the Bush administration and the MAHA movement is that Bush was willing to listen to an actual world expert and Trump and Kennedy fire them when they don’t fall in line and replace them with a rogue’s gallery of medical contrarians and podcasters. By listening and working with Fauci, Bush signaled he was serious and in line with science and humanity on this one thing. Kennedy has yet to show he is capable of accepting the science of anything. It’s only possible to work with people who are honest about having the same goal and aren’t going to replace the science with pseudoscience when the facts are inconvenient. An administration that doesn’t care about global warming, or doesn’t want to understand the impact of microplastics on food and health, or thinks unpasteurized milk is awesome, doesn’t give a shit about the food ecosystem so no one invested in facts can work with them on the food ecosystem. It won’t be possible to trust any data they bring to the table, never mind their intentions. An administration looking to gut Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) isn’t interested in healing anyone. And an administration that fabricates references and then blames it on the dog eating their homework isn't interested in accountability or transparency.

Working with the Kennedy and his administration in any format or even praising them for saying one thing that happens to be correct is a form of sane washing. If MAHA can get respected experts to say they are right about one thing, the positive perception and reputation bleeds over in a health halo effect. I think of it as prestige transfer, though I’m not 100% certain that’s a term. Imagine if a respected doctor worked with MAHA on one issue that seemed legit, MAHA then benefits from the association, and indirectly, that association may help MAHA achieve other goals, like restricting vaccines with less pushback, restricting mifepristone or the birth control pill, or even making them illegal. Some MAHA types were blathering on this week about the birth control pill being the first medication invented for chronic disease and was designed to keep people medicated (I know, it’s painful), so you can bet access to the birth control pill is on the agenda.

I could go on about the harmful policies and plans, but I don’t need to play those greatest hits, a list that sadly seems to be growing daily. The crux is that Kennedy and his MAHA minions are not promoting a public health agenda, no matter what they claim, they are simply using a misleading veneer of reasonableness. I mean, I can claim I'm an astronaut, but, spoiler alert, I am not. MAHA is a rebranding campaign for regressive policies and pseudoscience, cloaked in wellness buzzwords and cherry-picked truths. There’s no alliance to be had when the foundation is built on misinformation, misogyny, and manufactured credibility. We need to see every Kennedy policy for what it is: a Trojan Horse for pseudoscience, bad actors, misogynistic policies, and harm.