How MAHA Tore One Family Apart

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3:26Hi, Ruby. Hi. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I've developed a theory that I want to hear your take on, and it's that the Make America Healthy Again movement, or MAHA as we call it, may end up being one of the most consequential and long-lasting things about Trump's presidency. like way more than people typically give it credit for. You've covered this movement super closely. What do you think? I agree with you. I think one of the things that I found in researching the Maha movement was I kind of came to the question for myself of like, how did no one do this earlier? RFK seized on something that we all kind of intuitively feel is true about the current healthcare system.

4:11we are getting sicker as a country. Chronic diseases are on the rise. We do have the feeling that pharmaceutical companies aren't really out for our well-being compared to their motivations to make money. So these sort of feelings in the air of sort of distrust and suspicion towards the American healthcare system, he's put into words and created this movement that cuts across ideological lines in a really interesting, unexpected way. So I think you're right, it will be remembered as one of the sort of, like, main reorientations of the second Trump administration. That's Ruby Kramer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, who recently wrote a piece about a family dispute over vaccinations after the parents' children appeared to contract measles.

5:00Right now, we're living through the largest measles outbreaks in the U.S. in roughly 30 years. It comes amid plummeting vaccination rates and growing distrust of vaccines and the medical establishment more broadly. Ideas that have become increasingly woven into the political and social fabric of American life during Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services and alongside the broader rise of the Make America Healthy Again movement. I wanted to talk with Ruby about how Trump and RFK Jr. are responding to the current measles outbreak and the roles their policies have played in it, why the world of Maha and vaccine skepticism has become so appealing to so many people and how these beliefs constrain relationships when parents have to make increasingly consequential health decisions for their children.

5:41This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. Let's talk about measles and what's happening right now in the country. Measles were declared officially eliminated from the U.S. in the year 2000, and yet outbreaks still occur every year. So why are we talking about the current situation as a public health crisis or emergency in this particular moment if we still have these occasional outbreaks? Yeah, you're definitely right. Measles has been declared eliminated since the year 2000, but there have still been cases throughout the years. I think as vaccination rates have declined, we're now basically below the level required for herd immunity in most states.

6:25So that means that we're sort of losing an ability as a country to control the spread of measles once an outbreak begins. We saw that last year, first in West Texas, where an outbreak started and killed three people, including two children. And then later, as sort of cases started to break out across the U.S., a really particularly bad outbreak happened in South Carolina. That was considered the worst outbreak since the virus was declared eliminated. And now we're seeing even worse numbers in Pennsylvania this year. That outbreak that's ongoing right now is certainly on track to surpass the South Carolina outbreak.

7:06And it's already far more dangerous in the sense that four people have died. Some of these states that you mentioned, Texas, South Carolina, are deep red states. And so at what point does, I mean, I know we're going to talk later in this conversation about what the government is doing to arguably make this situation worse. But I guess to what extent does this seem like something that the administration cares about? Like, you know, we'll talk more about RFK Jr. later. But is it not a political problem for Trump or even for the local leaders in these red states, you know, to have their constituents getting sick or dying, especially when we're talking about children?

7:46I mean, you would think it's definitely part of—it was early on in this Trump second term, part of the thinking of his White House reportedly, that they should shy away from some of RFK's more extreme views on vaccines. Not something they should talk about. Midterms are now two months away. Like, you would think that this is something that's not going to benefit them politically. And yet President Trump himself has seemed like really personally interested in this issue. He signed an executive order in August where he did, you know, a signing event at the Oval Office and went on and on about vaccines, describing them in really sort of like menacing, visceral terms.

8:29Large amounts of vaccine, large amounts of like vats of vaccine are currently pumped into your child's body. And we're doing 20 percent of that at each visit. And we'll let time elapse between visits so the body can handle this massive amount of fluid being pumped in. and was talking about how he personally, as a father, always wanted to space out his own kids' vaccines. So after that executive order signing, I began to think that perhaps whatever reporting had been done indicating that the White House wanted to stay away from this issue has been kind of tossed out the window. To that point, Kennedy himself just appeared at the annual conference hosted by the anti-vax organization he founded, Children's Health Defense.

9:22Last year, he did not appear at that conference, but this year he did and he gave a very lengthy speech and promised the anti-vax community basically that they have a friend in the White House. So, I mean, that's a pretty public stage to go on, this close out to the midterm. So I'm not getting the sense that this White House is particularly worried about the impact that it might have on red state political prospects. We've been talking about how it's been playing out in some of the red states, but this past week saw a surge in cases in Pennsylvania, a purple state that is currently governed by a Democrat, Josh Shapiro.

10:02Can you talk about what we've been seeing there? Yes. So as people are getting measles by the hundreds in Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor, and Kennedy have basically been at war with one another, like exchanging tweets about the situation in Pennsylvania. I don't think we've really ever seen anything like this. Essentially, Shapiro very quickly declared the news last month that two people had died of measles. Kennedy very quickly then accused him of making that announcement prematurely and using it for political gain. and the suggestion being that Josh Shapiro like very may well run for president and was sort of like gleefully seizing on this news to say, look, see how bad the Trump administration is and I'm going to shepherd us through this moment of crisis.

11:04And the fight has sort of just like continued. Now Shapiro is declining, according to the CDC, declining assistance, federal assistance to help deal with the outbreak And he's saying, like, he won't accept that federal assistance until the CDC formally recognizes the four measles deaths that have occurred there. So it's just sort of spiraled and it's sort of turned into a very political fight set against this backdrop of, like, a very, very real crisis where, you know, four people have died and there have been 155-plus hospitalizations so far. Just going back to this idea of there being these measles deaths that the CDC won't count, I mean, that obviously sounds very bad.

11:54But I know that there's always like some ambiguity in attributing deaths. I remember during the pandemic, like there was this whole question over whether someone died from COVID versus died with COVID. And is it at all normal for the CDC to decline to count deaths that a state health department has already attributed to measles? Or is that just like a totally anomalous situation? My understanding is this is fairly unprecedented and that you don't typically see the CDC sort of questioning what a state health department is reporting. Now, the CDC has said it's sort of to your point of do you die with something or of something?

12:31It's evaluating how it defines measles related deaths and that it has been informed and made aware of the deaths and is looking into it. And the Pennsylvania Health Department has just been very firm on continuing to report these as measles deaths. And we've gotten so in the weeds that we're sort of like hearing from each individual coroner on each death and what they think and how we're defining each death. And I mean, what we do know for sure is that these are four people who were unvaccinated who died with measles. You mentioned earlier that we've essentially lost herd immunity because we've gone below the vaccination rate necessary as a population in order to have it.

13:20How long does it take to regain herd immunity? It's almost— Don't tell me you never can. Don't even go there. So in the process of putting together this article that I did last month, I started out by—I didn't really even know where to begin, but I started out by just talking to as many doctors and pediatricians as I could, including, you know, doctors who have treated measles cases in prior outbreaks. Like, there was a particularly bad outbreak in Southern California years ago that started at a Disney property. And this doctor I spoke to was at the heart of that. And he was telling me that it's sort of a pendulum swing dynamic.

14:04Like, after that outbreak in California, vaccination rates rose again. And he told me that he thinks the pendulum is going to just have to swing very, very far in order to kind of correct this. But it may take years and it may take a while. Now, I've also spoken to people who are basically take another view, which is that we're so far gone from a point where we have sound, secure public faith in vaccinations that you almost can't put the toothpaste back in the bottle at this point. And we would need like a really big sort of reversal of sentiment towards not just vaccine safety, but the entire like healthcare and pharmaceutical system, which is a very tough ask, I feel, in this environment.

14:52Yeah, I'm not sure if that's going to happen anytime soon. Yeah, and in part it's because some of the things that the Maha movement talks about are, like, they do resonate as emotionally true to people. Like, there are plenty of moms and parents who have had the experience of not being listened to by a doctor and who come away from that conversation feeling, like, really put out by the entire medical establishment. and one of the successful things about Maha is that it emphasizes parental instinct and parental choice and this idea that like as a mother no one cares about your child more than you do as a mother you have instincts that deserve to be heard so that's a pretty powerful like underlying emotional core to a political movement and I'm not sure how you know say the next democratic president begins to rebuild trust from a starting point like this.

15:52Yeah, I want to talk more about the Maha movement and how it can be seductive and even just the things that you talk about in the piece in terms of the things that an everyday person might agree with and how that can obviously be a slippery slope. So we're going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, we're going to talk more about the story you recently reported. This is The Political Scene from The New Yorker.

16:43We'll see you next time. on the Sweet Green app. This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents, but choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes. Chronic migraine. 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life.

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18:20So, Ruby, can you tell us what drew you to the subject of your most recent piece? Well, great question. We were watching these measles outbreaks, And I think we wanted to find a way to tell a story of a parent or parents who maybe came to this moment with a certain sort of sympathy for the Maha movement or a connection to it, and then found those beliefs challenged by sort of like the hardcore biological reality of the fact that vaccine-preventable diseases are coming back in this country. And we wanted to tell it in a sort of very human way and just understand how a person gets sucked into this movement and then how those beliefs are challenged.

19:04So it was kind of a tough ask because while there are many measles cases happening, it's hard to find parents who are willing to talk. Yeah, they're busy. They're busy. Also, it's not like people's names are plastered on a billboard when their kids get measles. It's a private thing. and it's a personal thing and it's scary and it's not just potentially sharing a story of like what happened to your kid when they got sick, but it's you're opening up your sort of like view of what, how to be a good parent. Yeah. Which is at the core of all this too. And that's why it just, it felt very sensitive and therefore it felt like something we had to handle with a lot of humane sensitivity.

19:46Which I think you did a tremendous job of, by the way. Thank you. So you ended up centering your story on a set of divorced parents, Michael and Leah, who had a strained relationship for years but had managed to more or less effectively co-parent their three children until this past spring. What happened that caused their relationship to reach a breaking point? Yeah. So when Michael and Leah got together, they were really young. Leah, the mom, never had given much thought to vaccines. She wasn't even particularly interested in like wellness or health or any of the other Maha adjacent sensibilities that are part of the movement.

20:25COVID hit and this was a theme I found throughout all my conversations with like Maha adjacent or Maha parents was COVID. COVID was either a radicalizing moment for people or it was a de-radicalizing moment for people which was really interesting like you could almost there were people who were kind of like ships in a night like as one became more immersed in the movement the other was starting to get out of it. For Leah this mom in West Virginia she was just spending more and more time on TikTok and Instagram. And in the beginning of the pandemic, she sort of along with most of sort of like mainstream society at the time was saying, yes, it's important to mask.

21:07Yes, let's listen to health experts. Yes, let's listen to the government. This is scary. And but as she was spending more and more time online, she saw how polarizing these fights were. And she described herself as someone who's just inherently open-minded to me. And she started researching more about what the other side was getting so upset about. And at the same time, she was pregnant with her second child. So she started thinking, well, you know, like, for example, is a doctor going to be able to deny me treatment if I refuse to get the COVID vaccine? Like, I don't think that's right. And so she just sort of became more immersed online in these sort of anti-vax, anti-medical orthodoxy conversations.

21:50And all of a sudden, she's talking about like the dangers of red dyes and chemical additives in the food supply. Which, again. Yes, again. There's something to that. And her husband at the time, Michael, had a very sort of hands-off approach to parenting. Like, he had the job. She was in charge of the kids. They both described their relationship like that to me. And he said that, you know, a year or two into COVID, he started noticing, like, wait a second. Why am I not allowed to give red lollipops to the kids? Because of the red dye. Why are we buying organic groceries? They're twice as expensive.

22:30Like, he was kind of more pissed about that, but not really understanding how far Leah was going down this rabbit hole. and eventually the marriage kind of fell apart in a strange series of events that I guess I won't like entirely spoil for the story, but like I'll just say had to do with sort of like going down this holistic wellness rabbit hole. They broke up. They're co-parenting their kids. They don't agree on whether to vaccinate them. Two of the three kids that they had together were unvaccinated. Michael was getting particularly worried about this because his middle child, Donnie, had spinal muscular atrophy, SMA, which is a disease that basically weakens your muscles and therefore leaves you more exposed to respiratory illnesses.

23:20So he really thought it was important for Donnie to get vaccinated. It was a source of conflict and tension. They fought a lot about medical care. He described this all to me. and by the time spring rolled around, measles cases were on the rise and he had them for spring break and suddenly the kids started to get really sick and he took them to the hospital. It was really scary. Like two of them had pneumonia. At one point the youngest, the daughter, was like hooked up to a bunch of tubes and people are tending to her in isolation gowns. Just like really scary stuff. And everything he's being told by the doctors that he's seen at these different medical facilities are telling him, your kids have measles.

24:08And so, yeah, it became sort of a very big fight between the two parents about the consequences of Leah's decision to not vaccinate the children. Based on their custody arrangements, Leah and Michael were supposed to make medical decisions jointly. But it seems like that still leaves a lot of room for conflict. So can you talk a little bit about the problems that emerged from there and kind of how they, once they figured out that the kids potentially had measles, like how just like the fact that they were divorced kind of affected the way that they, yeah, were sort of negotiating with each other or against each other?

24:43Yeah, I think that the custody agreement that they had come to and been ordered to follow by a judge stated vaguely that they should just make these decisions together. But the reality is when you have completely opposing views on what that means, it's a lot more complicated to put into practice. Like, Michael and Leah didn't even agree on what kind of doctor the kids should see. They didn't agree on when the kids should see a doctor, like what warranted a visit to the doctor's office. So I think basically, when it comes to the actual parenting of the children, it was a lot more complicated. And sort of their differing views on these issues permeated, you know, even like little things about whether the kids should be taking antibiotics for an ear infection.

25:31Like, it was just making these choices that kind of arise in any sort of daily week of just being parents to young kids who are getting sick made them sort of really fraught. And Michael described it to me as sort of like the center of the conflict that they had as they were trying to figure out how to be good co-parents to their children. And this is something I heard from a couple moms that I interviewed for the story is that the deeper that they went into the Maha movement and the more rigid they became in their beliefs, the more tension it caused in their relationships. And one mom I spoke to told me she almost got divorced from it.

26:08Another said, like, it was just a huge source of tension. So I do think that Michael and Leah's story is not an everyday story. You know, it's a very specific tale, as you'll see. but I do think that it's something that's going to be playing out in more households as these views sort of intensify and as the movement grows even more. So we're going to take another quick break and then when we come back we're going to hear the rest of Michael and Leah's story. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

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27:46It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness.