From The New York Times:
THE CONTEXT
Has the MAHA Movement Given Up?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies promised public-health libertarianism. The idea couldn’t survive once they took power.
David Wallace-Wells writes about science, climate change and technology.
How long will MAHA hold together? All spring, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, kept a relatively low profile — the outspoken tribune of an insurrectionary movement staying quiet at the reported urging of his boss. The agency rank and file rarely saw him. In recent weeks, he has made more public appearances, surrounded by rumors from longtime allies that he may leave the Trump administration — rumors his office denies. But however long Kennedy lasts in government, his Make America Healthy Again coalition already lies in shambles, its catalog of achievements short. What happened?
At present, there is no confirmed head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or of the Food and Drug Administration. There is no surgeon general and no head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, effectively the government’s lead scientific position for Anthony Fauci’s nearly four decades in the role. There is also no confirmed boss at the F.D.A.’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which regulates vaccines, and none at its Center for Drugs Evaluation and Research, which oversees drug therapies. Last year, staffing at the Department of Health and Human Services was reduced by 25 percent, leaving huge deficits of personnel and expertise. The agency looks less like an army of acolytes than a barren bureaucracy. This is not an overhaul; it is an evacuation, a disemboweling.
If you knew one thing about Kennedy upon his confirmation, it was probably his vaccine skepticism. But even his experts haven’t significantly altered America’s vaccine policies, making changes only to federal recommendations that parents could easily skirtand states quickly overrode. MAHA has been steamrolled on food and pollution by business-aligned Trump appointees elsewhere in the government, forced to concede longtime crusades against glyphosate, mercury and other airborne toxins. It endured another setback from the Supreme Court, in a case described as MAHA v. Trump, in which the administration backed the company manufacturing Roundup, not the plaintiffs arguing that it gave them cancer. The administration just signed off on more forever chemicals in pesticides and drinking water. A much-hyped report trying to link autism with the use of Tylenol in pregnancy was quickly disproved by larger studies, and a memo linking 10 childhood deaths to Covid vaccination was contradicted by the agency’s own review of the evidence. The biggest effect of the new regime on research hasn’t been a major turn toward MAHA priorities but major cuts to science funding overall.
You could see this all coming. Kennedy’s team of contrarians arrived in Washington already divided on some big questions: Were drugs overregulated or underregulated? Were vaccines rushed to market or too slow to get there? Did “gold-standard science” require randomized controlled trials or just compelling anecdotal evidence — of, say, a diet that supposedly alleviated someone’s A.D.H.D. symptoms or a regimen of cod liver that supposedly protected against measles? Should we embrace medical miracles like GLP-1s or treat obesity as a morality tale in which fat people deserved to suffer more and die earlier? Do chronic disease, disability rates and skyrocketing mental illness reveal a medical system designed not to cure people but to treat them for profit? Or were they projections of safetyist hysteria, the way liberals made meaning out of anxiety while dreaming of a world without risk?
These contradictions didn’t stop MAHA from sweeping into power last year, looking like a rising tide of skepticism and distrust. In reality, the movement was even then a thin and contradictory coalition held together primarily by Covid resentments, which would inevitably fade with time.
Start with Kennedy himself. Today he is no more popular than President Trump and does not seem to represent an independent bloc; his support, like the president’s, comes from MAGA loyalists. Among independents, Kennedy is 37 points underwater. This is not even a real reversal of fortune: When Kennedy abandoned his presidential campaign and joined Trump’s in the summer of 2024, it was not from a position of culture-shaping strength. He was polling below 10 percent.
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