Has RFK Delivered On MAHA Promises?

0:00This message comes from Angie. Tackling a home project, Angie can connect you with pros who do such a good job, you might ask them to be your kid's godfather. Don't do that. Just trust them to get the job done. Find a pro for your projects at Angie.com. That's A-N-G-I dot com.

0:25In 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a presidential hopeful, running under the banner of Make America Healthy Again. His most fervent supporters, among them vaccine skeptics and cynics, nutrition-focused parents, and anti-pesticide activists. After dropping out of the presidential contest and endorsing President Trump, Kennedy emerged as the president's foremost pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Now, many of the so-called Maha coalition are disappointed with Secretary Kennedy for what they describe as a failure to deliver key reforms to the nation's health and food systems.

1:06What I was seeing in the chat groups was, I guess I'm a Democrat now, right? So there are a lot of people who are very upset about what the Republicans are doing. That's Zen Honeycutt, prominent Maha influencer and founder and director of Moms Across America. They're a grassroots organization that advocates for clean food. We should note that we did reach out to Zen Honeycutt to invite her on the program, but we didn't hear back. The invitation, of course, stands. And later, we'll talk about what the rise in measles and other infectious diseases means for the state of our public health. Secretary Kennedy has repeatedly downplayed recent measles outbreaks and given deeply mixed messages on vaccination, along with his disinformation.

1:51I'm Todd Zwilich, in for Jen White. You're listening to the 1A podcast. We'll be back with more after this short break. Stay with us.

2:03This message comes from Angie. Tackling a home project, Angie can connect you with pros who do such a good job you might ask them to be your kid's godfather. Don't do that. Just trust them to get the job done. Find a pro for your projects at Angie.com. That's A-N-G-I dot com. Every day, NPR reports stories that keep you informed without fear or favor. That's the promise of a free press and a democracy. It's in the First Amendment. I'm Tom Bowman, and I cover the Pentagon for NPR. Stand up for independent news coverage today by donating early for public media giving days, coming up on May 1st and 2nd.

2:43Give now at donate.npr.org. Welcome back to the 1A podcast. We're talking about the fracturing Maha movement. Joining us in the studio in Washington, D.C., is Amanda Seitz, Washington health policy reporter at KFF Health News. Amanda, thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. Amanda, the Maha coalition, it's kind of a political buzzword right now. To me, it sounds like soccer moms or NASCAR dads used to sound. Political reporters are very fond of these labels. What is it exactly? What are the key priorities? Well, that's a great question. And I've even had that thought myself. Are these just rebranded soccer moms?

3:24Yeah. In a lot of ways, these are more conservative-leaning folks. But at the core, I would say, of the movement, these are people that say they're really concerned about the chemicals that are in our environment, whether it be food, whether it be in our water, whether it be on the crops that we grow. So I would say that is the biggest thing that's at the core of their movement. And that is kind of what unites them all here. Does Manga have a coherent ideology? You didn't mention anything about vaccines, in other words. Is it mostly about what they call clean food, chemicals in food? Because it does attract a lot of anti-vax, a lot of disinformation around that, a lot of other kind of parts of the ecosystem here.

4:06Is there a core or a coherent ideology? Yeah, I would say a lot of them are concerned about the chemicals that are also in the drugs that we use, the vaccines. It depends on who you talk to how big of a focus that vaccine part is. You know, they do not like the label anti-vaccine. They see it more as health freedom. I want the choice to choose whether my child should be vaccinated or not. I don't want to be told to be vaccinated. Is it an identifiable voting block or more of an interest group that leans Republicans? Is there a Maha vote or is that something, again, that political reporters tell themselves to make their jobs easier?

4:44You know, it's really hard, I think, to pull on this issue in part because make America healthy again sounds so agreeable. I've actually talked to people who think that it just means giving people health insurance, right? All things to all people. Yes, yes. So I think it's such an agreeable term that a lot of people say that they support it, and therefore it makes it very difficult to nail down who this group really is. The power of an excellent slogan. Yes. All right. Well, let's lift the hood on it. According to a political poll, while 48 % of respondents say they supported the Maha movement, only 34 % of respondents could actually explain what Maha is.

5:22And less than a third of respondents said they were part of it, part of the movement themselves. How does the number of Maha voters inform the approach the Trump administration has taken to addressing their concerns and their priorities? Why has the White House grabbed onto this so wholeheartedly? Is it because of Kennedy? Do they think there's good politics here? Do they think they're scooping up white women by the thousands? What are they doing here? Well, I definitely think that President Trump has always been attracted to Secretary Kennedy's message, and that is a big part of why he has globbed on to it.

5:57I think the other thing at play here is that, yes, they were bringing in a group of people that maybe was on the fence about voting Republican and firing them up with this message that we are going to entirely shake up the health system here in the U.S. And I think that's a big part of why they were bringing those folks in. All right. So let's talk about what Maha has actually delivered so far since not only does the Trump administration, Secretary of Kennedy, Secretary Kennedy have power, but they also have the trifecta in Congress. What have members of the Maha movement said are some of the biggest wins so far from Secretary Kennedy?

6:33Well, I think hands down, they are very happy about this change in the food pyramid. They see that as their biggest win. This message to, quote, eat real food, to stay away from ultra-processed food, that they have chalked up as their biggest win for sure. Nobody follows the food pyramid. It's always been – we all know what it is. We've been seeing it since elementary school. And not to mention the food pyramid had actually been out of use for quite some time before it was inverted by this administration. But, yeah, that is what they see as their biggest win. There's also some, you know, smaller wins.

7:07They've pressured companies into dropping food dyes, for example. And there have been some big changes to the vaccine schedule as well. And this group certainly sees that as a win, too. They consider that a win. Absolutely. Well, we're going to talk about the changes to the vaccine schedule, what the science says about the changes to the vaccine schedule and recent outbreaks across America, including measles, biggest outbreak in this country since 1990. We'll talk about all of that. The same political poll that I mentioned just a couple of moments ago, 47 percent of self-identified Maha supporters believe the Trump administration has not done enough to make the slogan a reality, to make America healthy again.

7:48Among them are 41 percent of people who say they voted for Trump in 2024. What about some of the movement's biggest losses in the eyes of the movement, things that Secretary Kennedy or the president have have yet to address? Well, you have to remember that this is a group that was promised on the night that President Trump won the election that Secretary Kennedy would be able to, quote, go wild on health. So they were coming in with this expectation that he would really be allowed to do whatever he wanted. And one of the biggest, I think where we saw the groundwork for this rift and this disappointment from the Maha movement was about a year ago when we were all watching for this highly anticipated Make America Healthy Again report to come out.

8:32And I remember in the days leading up to that report, I was getting calls from two different groups of people. They were the environmental activists that are loyal followers of Kennedy and farmers. and those people were frantically trying to figure out what this report would say about the weed-killing chemical glyphosate. The environmental activists very much wanted to see this report call for a full-throated ban, and the farmers wanted to make sure none of that happened. So they were calling frantically and really worried, and in the end, this report made just a small passing mention of glyphosate, and I think that laid the groundwork for this group to be unhappy because they wanted to see this chemical banned.

9:13And so far from this administration, all they've seen is support of this chemical. Now, glyphosate, we're going to talk about it. What is it? Sure. It is a chemical that is used on lawns and on crops across America. It's sprayed on them to reduce the number of weeds that are grown and basically allow farmers to turn more crops. Farmers say that they really need this chemical, but the environmental activists, Maha followers, they say that it has serious side effects. Is it dangerous? What does the science say about its health effects? You know, there's been a lot of mixed studies on this. The EPA has come out and said that, you know, it does not cause cancer.

9:58A lot of Maha folks that you talk to will say that that's because they ran rigged studies on this. The World Health Organization has labeled it as a cancer-causing carcinogen. Well, it goes further than just the report that you mentioned that barely mentioned glyphosate because last week a lot of Maha supporters were outraged that Secretary Kennedy endorsed an executive order from the president that he signed that will increase domestic production of glyphosate. Here's Zen Honeycutt again. Supporting glyphosate is the wrong direction to go in. And the explanation is that the farmers have come to them, which are primarily chemical farmers, and they have said that they will go out of business if they don't have glyphosate.

10:44I can understand that, but I would hope that this administration would keep their promise, which was addressing the world's pesticides in our food, childhood chronic illness and autism on the presidential platform, shaking Kennedy's hand, saying he could go wild. That's why Democrats and independents voted for Trump, for a Republican, for the first time in their life. And we expect this administration to keep their promise. That's Zen Hudikud again, founder and director of Moms Across America. We mentioned her at the top of the show. She was speaking to CNN there with very clear outrage, personal and political, over the, I'll call it the glyphosate flip-flop, if you like, in Maha within HHS in the White House.

11:25Yeah, I was outside of the Supreme Court on Monday where they were hearing a case that would basically allow Bayer to be absolved of responsibility for some of the lawsuits related to this chemical. And it was very palpable how upset these people are. I mean, they feel extremely betrayed. I thought Vani Hari made this kind of stunning jab at this administration by saying, quote, you cannot tell Americans to eat real food while protecting the cancer-causing chemicals sprayed on it. I thought that was pretty remarkable. I mean, she is someone that has stood up with Secretary Kennedy, and here she was openly, like, critiquing, saying that this administration is being hypocritical, essentially.

12:11Okay, but it's not a one-two punch even. It's a one-two-three punch. Here you have what we're calling a major political coalition of Donald Trump's political movement along with RFK. The reason he brought RFK in high profile anti-vax conspiracy theorist to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Then right away, the report barely mentions the chemical they're most concerned with. They sign an executive order to promote it. Now they're fighting in the Supreme Court to produce tips to promote it even more. I mean, the writing is clear. The Trump administration is not down with Maha on this. It couldn't be more obvious.

12:52Why are they surprised? Well, I think they truly believed that, like I said, going back to that promise that Trump said on election night, that they would let Kennedy go wild and that they have just not been able to deliver on that promise. Going wild, how much of an effort did Kennedy himself make in the presidential campaign or in the promotion of his political profile on glyphosate to tell his followers, I'm going to do something about this? Because he didn't mean it. He definitely didn't mean it. Yeah. I mean, this is a man that has said repeatedly that these chemicals cause cancer. He has been part of lawsuits representing victims who say that they developed cancer from its use.

13:35So certainly this is part of why this coalition is so upset. This is a core part of his message. And this is the environmental side, really, of RFK Jr. The part that a lot of reasonable people actually like, not his anti-vax conspiracies, his anti-science politics. This is the part about his public profile that people were really invested in. It's fascinating. Well, also last week, a series of hearings on Capitol Hill. RFK Jr., the HHS secretary, he testified in a lot of different venues about the priorities at HHS. Here's a bit of his exchange with Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy. There are currently political appointees at CDC who have worked to undermine trust and immunizations.

14:20Will the new director, whoever she is, have the right to make decisions independently of those of those political appointees and or replace them or otherwise reassign them so they cannot continue to actively undermine trust and immunizations? Your characterization of the political appointees is wrong. And the CDC director has that power. If she wishes to make a decision independently of them, she shall be allowed to make that decision independently. That's correct. Yes. We'll talk about whether that's a credible statement from the health secretary in that hearing with Senator Cassidy. What are your biggest takeaways from Kennedy's testimony on Capitol Hill last week?

15:05what lawmakers and senators demanded of him and what he's saying. There we're talking about the vaccination part of Maha. Where's the secretary at now? I thought it was very fascinating how much, even in his opening statements, which, you know, he's writing himself, I saw a striking difference in what he was talking about in front of lawmakers compared to a year ago when he was first testifying for his confirmation hearings. And you saw him focus on prescription drug prices. You saw him talk about health care price transparency. Those were just not topics that he was talking about or, frankly, well read on before Congress just a year ago.

15:47And he's focusing on those issues because the White House has told him to. He talked, of course, about some of his other priorities as well, but the focus was on President Trump's agenda. Back off why. It's bad politics now, the anti-vax? Yeah, so the White House has conducted polling that shows how unpopular his vaccine messages are really widespread among Americans and even among the Maha movement as well. The thing that they can agree on is that nutrition is a very popular part of his agenda. And the president has made it clear that he also wants to focus on health care affordability ahead of the midterms.

16:25Well, public health experts, the serious ones, will tell you that Robert F. Kennedy has done enormous damage to the vaccine schedule and to public faith in vaccines. According to an October poll from KFF in the Washington Post of parents in the United States, most said longstanding childhood vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, and polio are important for children to get, and they're still confident in their safety. eight in 10 parents supported mandating these vaccines to attend public school. This echoes sentiment that the president's top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, wrote in a memo in December, in districts that will decide control of the House of Representatives next year, Republican and Democratic candidates who support eliminating longstanding vaccine requirements will pay a price, says Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio.

17:13That's a warning. Despite all of this, Last June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice, known as ASIP, at the CDC. He replaced the panel with handpicked members, among them vaccine skeptics, vaccine cynics, and even some disinformation artists with PhDs. Where does that leave Maha voters whose top issue is vaccine overhaul? Seems like the politics doesn't agree with them. Yes. But the damage is done. The damage has been done. There's more damage to come, as research has shown. But the vaccine, the anti-vaccine folks are not happy with what they're seeing.

17:53They want more. They want the COVID vaccine removed from the schedule. And they want more recommendations removed from the schedule. We've been hearing from lots of you. Dan emails to say, yes, most would like to make America healthier. But a lot of Maha people I talk to want to entirely ignore science. Science and health go hand in hand. It's the anti-science attitude that keeps many people away. Dan, thanks for that response. We're talking about fractures in the Maha movement and what effect they could have as we approach the midterms and their effect on public health. Still to come, as Secretary Kennedy shirks responsibility for the largest measles outbreak this century, an infectious disease specialist weighs in on how Maha rhetoric has shifted public health.

18:36That's just ahead. Stay with us.

18:42This message comes from Angie. Tackling a home project, Angie can connect you with pros who do such a good job you might ask them to be your kid's godfather. Don't do that. Just trust them to get the job done. Find a pro for your projects at Angie.com. That's A-N-G-I dot com. Welcome back. It's 1A. I'm Todd Zwillick. We're talking about the Maha movement in America, RFK Jr., and the state of our public health. Tom in Michigan says Kennedy and Trump have gone wild. They've thrown out science as the principal guidepost for health and development of life-saving treatments. We need science and facts to run the show.

19:22We have a president and a secretary of HHS who would like to wing it and go by gut feel while supporting their friends' businesses. Tom, thanks for that remark. And Juan emails to say, I was a follower of RFK Jr., and I still believe he's an asset. But it's disappointing to see him endorsing Trump and increasing the production of cancer-associated chemical like glyphosate, as Amanda Seitz mentioned just some moments ago. It shows, Juan says, how corrupt it is in D.C. Amanda Seitz, Washington health reporter at KFF Health News, is with us. And joining us now is Dr. Celine Gounder. She's an infectious disease specialist and an epidemiologist at the New York University School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital Center.

20:06She's also editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News. Dr. Gounder, great to have you. It's a pleasure to be here, Todd. Well, we talk about Maha and RFK Jr. and the politics of public health and vaccines. The United States is in the throes of the worst measles outbreak in decades. Last year, three people died from measles. They were the first measles deaths in 10 years in this country. So far in 2026, the CDC has confirmed more than 1 ,700 cases of measles in the United States. It's 92 % of those infections occurred in unvaccinated people. Other vaccine-preventable diseases like whooping cough are also on the rise, according to the latest available data.

20:52Dr. Gounder, what's driving this rise in preventable infectious disease? Well, big picture, it is a war on vaccines. And we've seen irreparable harm done to the public's trust in vaccine and vaccine infrastructure. So you have a number of different, the timeline of this is really relentless. So starting last summer, you have Kennedy firing all 17 members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He then appoints a number of anti-vaccine activists, people hostile to the core mission of the federal vaccine schedule. You then have the rollback of COVID vaccines for children and pregnant women.

21:38you have the defunding of mRNA research, which, by the way, mRNA vaccines are not just for COVID. We're seeing them developed not only for other infectious diseases, but for cancer, for autoimmune disease. Recent news on promising results for pancreatic cancer, which doesn't have a cure. That's right. Yeah. That's right. So to be fair, that was a phase one trial, only 16 people, but very exciting. Pancreatic cancer, melanoma, et cetera. So this is not just about infectious diseases. And when you slow any of the mRNA vaccine research, you're slowing all of it. You also had the cancellation of a pro-vaccination campaign during the midst of an active measles outbreak, a cancellation of the flu vaccine campaign that the CDC usually has every year.

22:27And then you have state-level multipliers. You have over 420 anti-science and anti-vaccine bills that have been introduced in state houses nationwide, plus very well organized and funded groups attached to Kennedy and the Maha movement who are supporting this. I mean, Dr. Gounder is describing a dynamic that even if RFK sort of backs off the fire and brimstone anti-vax stuff, the damage is done not only in ASIP at the top of the government, but down at the state and local level where this is now a culture of disinformation, right? It's gone down to the grassroots. So now that there is a measles outbreak, 1 ,700 cases in the United States, as I mentioned, how is Kennedy squaring this reality with his promise to make America healthy again and his long history of vaccine disinformation?

23:23Well, we saw him try to tell lawmakers that he was not responsible for this decline in vaccination rates because it began before he took office. And he's right, technically. But we should all keep in mind that before he took office, he was running an organization that was known as one of the biggest purveyors of misinformation and conspiracy theories around vaccines. So he certainly helped lay the groundwork, even if he was not in office, for what we're seeing now. And we're not going to see the fallout from what he has done over the past year until several years from now. There was a report that came out in JAMA that concluded infections, death, liver cancer, health care costs are all going to go up because of the recent CDC recommendation that removed that universal recommendation for all newborns.

24:21So we haven't seen those side effects yet of what Celine just talked about. Just to follow on that, even if you take RFK at his word that he's not to blame for the decline because it happened, it started before he took office, he's the nation's top public health official. His responsibility is to reverse it, to make it better, not whether or not he's to blame for it starting. That's exactly right. And the other thing that I think is important to note is that we have not seen any coordinated campaign or messaging from this administration urging Americans to get vaccinated. And that is such a stark difference from previous administrations.

24:57Even during the first Trump administration, we saw the president, we saw the health secretary come out during outbreaks that were not even as bad as what we're seeing now, urging Americans to get vaccinated. And we're not seeing that at all now. Well, Amanda Seitz, you just mentioned this important piece of data. Two peer-reviewed studies published Monday predicted that the Trump administration's move to change the recommendation that newborns receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth will likely lead, as you mentioned, to hundreds of additional infections among children. The studies also predicted that the change in guidance will lead to more cases, as you said, liver cancer, which is a consequence of hepatitis B, deaths, millions in added health care costs.

25:39And I remind you, we're talking about vaccinations for children. Dr. Gounder, what evidence did vaccine advisors use to change the longstanding recommendation for hepatitis B vaccine in newborns? I would say this is less about evidence and more about gut and vibe in terms of their opinions as to whether babies should be vaccinated at birth. And one of the main arguments is that, well, babies don't use injection drugs. Babies don't have sex. So therefore, they're not at high risk, especially if you can document that the mother does not have hepatitis B. The problem with that is pregnant women or women who've just had a baby are not the only source of a hepatitis B infection.

26:28Hepatitis B is far more infectious than HIV or hepatitis C, and I think people are conflating the three thinking they're equivalent. Hepatitis B can be transmitted by other caregivers in the home, more casual kinds of contacts, say, for example, like a toothbrush. And so for that reason, we did the natural experiment, actually, if you go back to the 80s. We saw what it was like when you did not provide hepatitis B vaccine at birth. Children were being infected by other caregivers in the household. Most of us do not know what the hepatitis B vaccination status is or testing status is of, say, a babysitter or the people working in the daycare.