Can MAHA Spell the End of the Conservative Movement?
At four o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday, February 13, I found myself on the eleventh floor of the National Press Center in Washington, DC, attending the press conference of the MAHA Alliance, the extra-government arm of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
I was invited there by pure serendipity. The day before, on Wednesday, I learned that Kennedy’s final senate vote was scheduled for the following morning. Wednesday was also the day that The New York Times published an investigation into the web of Kennedy’s friends who helped publish the latest vaccines-cause-autism study that he quoted with good effect in the hearings. I had collected a lot of material for that story, discovering the role of Andrew Wakefield in Kennedy’s “manufacture of evidence”. Wednesday night, I naively walked the halls of the Senate Office Buildings hoping to run into a senator and tell them my story in case that could somehow impact the next day’s vote. The only thing I accomplished was to get a pass to watch the historic vote from the senate gallery. I spent the night broken-hearted, watching the democrats’ desperate filibuster on C-SPAN, as they repeated the old talking points from Kennedy’s hearings.
On Thursday morning, I tried to get into the gallery at the Capitol but was stopped: the coat check had not yet opened, and bags were not allowed. Next to me, a group of about a dozen well-dressed and cheerful people had the same problem. “Let’s leave the bags in the car,” I heard them say. I asked if they would take my bag, too, and they enthusiastically agreed. “Which organization are you from,” I asked.” “MAHA,” they said. “The MAHA,” I asked, incredulous. “Yes, they said – check out our new website – www.maha.io.” The only thing I could make out before we had to turn off our phones was “Press conference – today at 4pm.” My new friends invited me to come.
I arrived as the journalists were gathering in a small foyer. Two tall men chatting with each other were the center of attention and had a camera and a pole microphone pointed at them. As I later learned, they were Del Bigtree, the new CEO of MAHA Alliance, and Senator Ron Johnson, a staunch supporter. One of the reporters came up to them. “Thank you for your balanced coverage,” said Bigtree, as Senator Johnson nodded and smiled.
We gradually piled into the room. Senator Johnson was first to speak. His remarks echoed an event he had organized on Capitol Hill in September 2024 called “American Health and Nutrition: A Second Opinion.” At that event, he was sitting next to Kennedy, flanked by Calley and Casey Means and Dr Marty Makary, who was nominated to be the head of FDA (more on him below.) Senator Johnson spoke at the time of “The corruption and capture of government agencies, the media, medical journals and the medical establishment by large corporate interests.”
Next, with effusive praise, Senator Johnson introduced Del Bigtree.
What followed was nothing short of a revolt against science, medicine and the media. And ominously, to this day the press conference received almost no press coverage. As one journalist told me, “he [Bigtree] didn’t really make any news.” I will let you judge.
Del Bigtree gained notoriety as the creator of a 2016 documentary called “Vaxxed,” along with Andrew Wakefield, a British surgeon who lost his medical license due to a now-retracted Lancet study which first postulated the vaccine-autism link as described in Brian Deer’s book, The Doctor who Fooled the World. Following the Lancet study, many global health agencies sprung into action to look for the link, including the CDC – in all cases finding nothing. In fact, the only studies that have continued to show the link to autism are all small, flawed and sponsored by Kennedy’s associates.
The documentary attempts a come-back by arguing that the CDC did in fact find a link but buried it, citing a purported CDC whistleblower who never actually blew the whistle.
Bigtree gained notoriety lately due to his provocative stunts at anti-vaccine rallies, as well as for spreading anti-vaccine propaganda among vulnerable communities such as Orthodox Jews. His anti-vaccine organization has enjoyed a “pandemic windfall,” bringing in millions of dollars.
Bigtree is an excellent speaker, but in a disturbing way – his intensity provoked a visceral fear in me. His tone was at times soft, almost theatrical, but at times he would bellow at the reporters. The message was clear. He is a friend of Kennedy’s. He is an insider. He has a view of Kennedy’s priorities and next steps, implying that MAHA Alliance is an extension of Kennedy’s agenda. And most importantly, “we now have a truth-teller in the administration.” So you all, the press, better get in line.
“Where was your science? And exactly how do you call the people who got it right “the spreaders of misinformation?” YOU are the spreaders of misinformation! You have gotten it wrong. And America is still waiting for an apology,” he yelled, as the reporters looked down.
I subsequently made a short video of the highlights.
“The giant industrial-medical complex is pushing drugs into our children starting in elementary school. One in four kids leaving elementary school will be on drugs for the rest of their lives. I didn’t grow up like that. There is no reason we should be like that. Except we let the pharmaceutical industry buy up the news agencies, buy up the hospitals, the most powerful lobby in Washington – but today, they lose. Today, the people win!”
“You’re going to have to think about what you do from here, as Robert F Kennedy Jr starts bringing the MAHA movement and idea into the regulatory agencies, as he starts doing the studies and science that we’ve been asking for for decades. He will stop the gaslighting of people – ‘we can’t figure out what’s causing autism…’ – either someone is lying, or someone needs to be FIRED. And that starts today.”
“We are going to create media to support everything Robert F. Kennedy is doing. Because you’ll probably be mandated to scream ‘bloody murder’ every time a transparent study comes out. But we will be counteracting that with the truth-tellers that got us to this place”
“We will create a national database of all the practitioners that are going to heal you!”
“We will see if you start reporting now that we have a truth-teller inside of government, we will see if you start reporting, as you watch this movement, in the hands of the people, the MAHA movement growing every single day. They are going to look who is telling the truth, and see who is lying to them. Maybe they can forgive you. I will if you start doing your job.”
The reaction from my physician friends and colleagues to my video was shock and disbelief.
What struck me the most, however, was the story of Hepatitis B. If there was any doubt prior to Kennedy’s confirmation that he would continue his war on vaccines, that doubt was dispelled by Bigtree in that press conference, just hours after Kennedy was sworn in.
With the confidence of a medical school professor, Bigtree described the exchange between Senator Rand Paul and Senator Bill Cassidy in Kennedy’s confirmation hearing.
“In the conversation, Rand Paul pointed out that Hep B is a sexually transmitted disease. The vaccine was developed for prostitutes and people who were having extreme sexual relations or heroin addicts. And he said ‘I think a parent should have the right to decide whether to vaccinate their one-day-old baby, which is when this vaccine is delivered, all across America. You should be able to opt out of the Hep B vaccine since it’s unlikely that in the near future for a day-old baby having extreme sexual intercourse or sharing heroin needles. So what is the purpose?
And of course Senator Cassidy – I’m very glad he had many deep conversations with RFK Jr – but right before our eyes we saw what conversation can happen when reasonable people start talking about an issue they have never been allowed to talk about before. Senator Cassidy in front of TV all across the world had to state, ‘You know what, you are making a good point. It is a sexually transmitted disease. But in mothers who are Hep B positive, that vaccine is going to save that infant’. Senator Rand Paul pointed out, rightfully so, that every mother in America is tested prior to delivering the baby. So they know whether they are positive or not! So why is every woman being forced to give their baby Hep B vaccine when we already know their status? And right there, in front of the world, Senator Cassidy said “You know what, OK – I don’t think a mother should be forced to [vaccinate her infant] it if she is Hep B negative!”
We just watched the first transformation of a medical doctor and an important conversation changing his mind based on available science that – was he unaware of it prior to that conversation? I don’t know. Or had he forgotten about that? I don’t know. But what we did see is a mind being changed. So when people say, “Is RFK Jr going to take the vaccine away?” I would say that RFK Jr is going to begin a conversation for transparency, talking about the actual science that is written in every one of these.
The sight of Bigtree in front of the national media arguing against universal day 1 Hep B vaccination made me shudder. Senator Cassidy has been in the senate for over 10 years, so I don’t blame him for forgetting the reason why Hep B vaccination is recommended for all newborns, even when the mother is negative. Hep B is highly contagious, can be transmitted through contact with skin if there are scratches or dermatitis, without any visible blood, and can survive on surfaces for over a week. Over 4% of Americans are infected with Hep B, much higher in certain communities. Any time an infected person is close to an infant, there is a risk of infection. And if an infant gets infected, they have a 90% chance of becoming a chronic carrier, and a 25% chance of dying of Hep B-induced cirrhosis or liver cancer, usually decades later. The WHO in fact has been spearheading a campaign to eliminate Hep B entirely through increased day 1 vaccination around the world. Bigtree single-handedly undermined that whole effort, right in front of my eyes.
I witnessed the CEO of MAHA Alliance literally causing people to die – not now, but decades later.
The next morning I learned that during Kennedy’s swearing-in ceremony, Trump signed an Executive Order to form the MAHA Commission. “Autism spectrum disorder now affects 1 in 36 children in the United States — a staggering increase from rates of 1 to 4 out of 10,000 children identified with the condition during the 1980s,” the order states.
These statistics have been used as a rallying cry in the anti-vaccine community, despite clear evidence that the vast majority of this increase is attributed to improved diagnosis, universal screening, reduced stigma and better availability of support services that are reimbursed by insurance, providing a reason to make a specific diagnosis. And in fact the autism community has repeatedly come out against continued research into vaccine as a cause.
To address this and other rising rates of chronic disease in children, the order proposes a most bizarre list of potential causes: “the American diet, absorption of toxic material, medical treatments, lifestyle, environmental factors, Government policies, food production techniques, electromagnetic radiation, and corporate influence or cronyism.”
Even more puzzling than the scientific question is the membership of the committee itself. In fact, rather than “MAHA Commission,” a more appropriate title would be “MAHA, Project 2025 (Heritage Foundation) and America First Policy Institute Commission.”
MAHA itself, paradoxically, is the most obscure of the three. It is represented by Kennedy, the chair of the Commission. David Weldon would also be on the committee if confirmed as head of the CDC. While not currently associated with MAHA, he is described as Kennedy’s “anti-vaccine ally.”
The term MAHA (but not the substance) appears to have been derived from the title of a 2020 book by Nicole Saphier. Kennedy trademarked it and recently passed on the trademark to Bigtree’s MAHA Alliance. Prior to Bigtree’s diatribe, the most vivid description was provided by The Free Press: “The coalition of Nutritionists, Shamans and Moms.” A search of scientific literature yields practically nothing. Kennedy’s campaign materials describe alarmist statistics of increasing chronic disease rates, particularly autism, concerns with vaccine safety, and environmental exposures to toxins. No detailed written platform existed prior to Trump’s EO Curiously, the EO does not mention vaccines at all, instead referring ominously to “ending Federal practices that exacerbate the health crisis.”
And even though Senator Johnson described MAHA on February 13th as an “enormous and growing movement,” there is no data to back this up. The majority of US voters, even republicans, support vaccination (which may be why vaccines are not mentioned in the executive order).
The second set of healthcare priorities on the MAHA Commission comes from an obscure organization called the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), whose founder and CEO, Brooke Rollins, is on the commission in her role as Secretary of Agriculture. Another member of the MAHA Commission, Lee Zeldin, the head of EPA, was chair of AFPI’s “Pathway to 2025” initiative. Interestingly, Forbes reported in November that it was the AFPI, rather than Project 2025, that was providing policy suggestions in support of Trump’s presidential transition.
AFPI’s assessment of the state of healthcare in the US is quite different from what is described in the Executive Order, stating that “only half of Americans receive recommended care; quality of care varies across conditions, demographic groups, and communities.” In a recent panel discussion, The Honorable Bobby Jindal, Chair of AFPI’s Center for a Healthy America, described the US as “home to the greatest physicians and healthcare systems in the entire world. That’s why people come here for care.” He cited rising costs, burdensome paperwork and insurance coverage as key problems, rather than poor outcomes. Consistent with this assessment, AFPI Healthcare policies are primarily focused on cost containment – reducing drug prices and controlling Medicare and Medicaid expenditures. Vaccines or other overtreatment themes of the Executive Order are not mentioned.
Would the presence of two members with AFPI backgrounds on the MAHA Commission impact its outcome? “AFPI is a relatively young think tank,” Dr Ge Bai, a member of AFPI’s board of academic advisors and Professor of Health Policy & Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. “It has influence in the policy world. The CEO is now a member of the administration. So it’s safe to say that AFPI policies will have a higher chance of being implemented.”
Last but not least, several members of the MAHA Commission (assuming all are confirmed) have connections to the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. Russel T. Vought, the Head of OMB, is one of the authors. Dr Jay Bhattacharia has several connections to conservative think tanks, most notably the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), located in Great Barrington, MA, which sponsored the eponymous Declaration for which Bhattacharia is well-known. William Ruger, the President of AIER, is an author of Project 2025 and spent years working at the Charles Koch Foundation. The Koch family is a major supporter of the Heritage Foundation. And Stanford, where Bhattacharia is on faculty, has a history of associations with conservative think tanks.
Dr Marty Makary is a graduate of the Claremont Institute and a Fellow of the Paragon Institute, both on Project 2025’s Advisory Board. So is America First Legal Foundation, founded by Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for policy and also a member of the MAHA Commission.
The idea of think tanks helping with presidential transitions is not new. Democrats were first, with the Brookings institution going back to 1916. John F. Kennedy, for example, relied on about 100 Brookings scholars for policy issues. On the conservative side, there was a gap. “The left had a finely tuned policy-making machine, and the right had nothing to match it,” recalled Ed Feulner who would go on to become the Founder and President of Heritage Foundation when it was formed in 1973 until his retirement in 2013. The goal was to conduct policy research. “A key moment in this alchemy occurred when Brooking’s experts transmuted the academic’s theoretical plan into an acceptable legislative proposal,” described Lee Edward, Feulner’s biographer.
Over the decades, the Heritage Foundation grew into the largest think tank in the US, with about a 100-million-dollar annual budget, a lobbying arm, hundreds of researchers and hundreds of thousands of paying “members” who represent a “national movement,” in the words of Edward. In addition, Heritage maintains what is known as a “Resource Bank” to “identify conservative policy experts on and off the campus and connect them to the Washington Policy community.”
It’s not just small donors that support the Heritage Foundation. Its donor list is hidden due to its 501(c)3 nonprofit status, but is thought to include industry influences, going back to the original founding grant from Joseph Coors, a beer magnate. Big conservative donors such as Koch and Scaife are behind it as well, as Jane Mayer describes in her book, Dark Money.
In 1981, The Heritage Foundation released a unique document, “unprecedented in national policymaking.” It was called “Mandate for Leadership” and was designed to serve as a guide for the next republican President, at that time Ronald Reagan. Since then, there have been nine editions of the Mandate for Leadership. Project 2025 is the latest one.
Over the decades, through the successive editions of the Mandate for Leadership, the evolving Heritage Foundation ideology is laid bare. In a recent lecture, Dr Brian M. Conley, the Chair of Political Science and Legal Studies at Suffolk University in Boston, describes three factions of the Republican party: Libertarians, with the idea of limited or no state; Traditionalists, promoting family, religious life and moral state; and Corporatists, promoting a free market, corporate power and a “pro-business regulatory state.” “The first, 1981 edition, heavily, disproportionally, almost exclusively, overwhelmingly favors a corporatist perspective,” says Conley. “Its primary function was to combat, counter, capture and remake the regulatory state. It outlined how the Executive Branch could be remade to promote and protect business interests. And this remains unchanged today.”
How to accomplish this? “The whole effort is animated by the Reagan-era maxim that personnel is policy, that power flows from having the right people in the right jobs,” writes Alex MacGillis in Propublica. “Act promptly to fill vacancies and find persons of high quality and friendly persuasion,” quotes Conley from the first edition of Mandate for Leadership. This theme echoes through Project 2025, which includes, in addition to the book, a database of up to 20,000 “potential administration officials” created in a massive, 22-million-dollar effort unprecedented even for the Heritage Foundation itself. “Heritage usually compiles its own personnel lists, and spends far less doing so. But for this election, after conservatives and Mr. Trump himself decried what they viewed as terrible staffing decisions made during his administration, more than 50 conservative groups have temporarily set aside rivalries to team up with Heritage on the project,” reported The New York Times.
It is therefore no surprise that Trump tapped many of key Project 2025 players for key positions in the new administration. This is “personnel is policy” in action.
What is the healthcare policy of the Heritage Foundation that is likely to influence the MAHA Commission through its Heritage-connected members, Miller, Vought, Makary and Bhattacharia?
In assessing the state of health in the US today, Project 2025 strikes an alarmist tone more akin to the MAHA talking points rather than AFPI: “As a result of HHS’s having lost its way, U.S. life expectancy, instead of returning to normal after the COVID -19 pandemic, continued to drop precipitously to levels not seen since 1996 with white populations alone losing 7 percent of their expected life span in just one year.”
Traditionalist themes are of course present as expected for any conservative agenda. Anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-transgender themes run throughout, at times bordering on comical – “homes with non-related “boyfriends” present are among the most dangerous place for a child to be.” But the language has become more extreme. While the 2016 edition of Mandates for Leadership meekly states, “Providers and organizations should not be required to offer services, such as abortion, that violate their conscience,” Project 2025 takes a more aggressive stance, calling for withdrawal of mifepristone from the market, and policing of abortions in blue states by the CDC, among other measures.
Libertarian anti-lockdown themes make their first appearance post-COVID in Project 2025. “Never again should public health bureaucrats be allowed to hide information, ignore information, or mislead the public concerning the efficacy or dangers associated with any recommended health interventions because they believe it may lead to hesitancy on the part of the public,” the document states. It demands to “severely confine the CDC’s ability to make policy recommendations,” and to “investigate, expose, and remediate any instances in which HHS violated people’s rights by colluding with Big Tech to censor dissenting opinions during COVID.”
Another libertarian theme has emerged in Project 2025 as compared to 2016: anti-elitism. Russel Vought, in his Project 2025 chapter, attacks the “pervasive notion of expert ‘independence’ that protects so-called expert authorities from scrutiny.” Makary and Bhattacharia would agree. Both have come out strongly against the medical establishment. Their colleague on the editorial board of a new anti-establishment journal said, “Traditional medical journals are dead.”
However, the main theme of the Project 2025 document, consistent with the Heritage Foundation ideology, is corporatist, Conley told me. But corporatists have a problem: how to communicate their unpopular pro-business message to the public. “For politics in the US to be successful it has to become ‘Majoritarian’ - it has to appear like it has a broad base of support in the public. That was always a challenge for the business community: ‘how do we create a majoritarian base when we represent a very small percentage of the people?’ And the way to do it is to say, we are not the threat. The government is the threat,” he says in his lecture.
Project 2025 does have prominent anti-corporate themes that are echoed by Bigtree, Senator Ron Johnson, Makary and Bhattacharia, talking of conflicts of interest and mechanisms by which “pharmaceutical companies capture the agencies that regulate them.” But behind the veneer of anti-industry messaging is a pervasive pro-business agenda, such as for example in requiring “efficacy trials of new applications for generic drugs, which might include NIH funding such trials or conducting its own,” a huge win for the pharmaceutical industry. Drug prices, one of the pervasive issues of US healthcare today, is not even mentioned. No wonder the industry has remained quiet.
Overall, Project 2025 has taken a much more extreme, darker, combative stance than the 2016 version. The reason is clear: Following the stepping down of Ed Fuelner as CEO (who remains active on its Board of Trustees), Kevin Roberts took the helm in 2021. Roberts’ recent book, Dawn’s Early Light, with a foreword by J.D. Vance, calls for a “Second American Revolution” - “a crusade to take back our country” - by “The New Conservative Movement” against the “coastal elites,” who are committing “a conspiracy against the American people.”
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How will all these forces and influences play out on the MAHA Commission, and in the new administration’s healthcare strategy overall?
How does Kennedy’s MAHA and vaccine skepticism and concerns about medication as cause of disease fit into the AFPI and Heritage Foundation healthcare strategies? AFPI in fact talks about the opposite: half of Americans not receiving the healthcare services they need. And Project 2025 does not mention overtreatment as a concern but rather that “thousands of Americans of faith and conscience wish to receive various childhood vaccinations for themselves and their families but are not allowed to receive vaccines that are derived through or tested on aborted fetal cells… There are ethically derived alternatives abroad that have been used safely there for decades, but the FDA makes it exceedingly difficult for Americans to import them.”
Herein lies a contradiction. In Dawn’s Early Light, Robbins paints a vision for the country: “a bright American tomorrow, one full of children, prosperity, community, growth, faith, virtue and liberty.” “A culture of children is a culture of hope,” he says. “The more children we have, the more young people we will have to help solve problems of tomorrow.”
But there is a real possibility that Kennedy’s MAHA platform could interfere with this vision, instead leading to massive death and suffering in this country and globally. We already witnessed one example of this – speaking out against the Hep B vaccine – within hours of his confirmation. The death and suffering from this message alone will last for decades. Other examples include halting the flu vaccine campaign, a spread of measles in Texas left uncontrolled. More broadly, the MAHA Commission could lead to worsening health outcomes in several ways: by gutting federal healthcare agencies of people and budgets, stopping medical research projects; by delegitimizing the medical establishment which has been refining the art and science of medicine for centuries (in that context, MAHA Commission’s goal of ‘increasing research rigor’ is laughable – neither Makary nor Bhattacharia have any clinical or basic research expertise); by fear-mongering leading to under-use of evidence-based interventions; by ignoring disparities in care that are the main problem in the US, as AFPI rightfully points out. And finally, by scientific fraud and “manufacture of evidence” which threatens to damage the integrity of scientific literature for generations to come, around the world.
I spoke about this with Ed Fuelner himself. “I can say this with some certainty. Until President Trump decided that Robert F. Kennedy Jr would be his nominee for Health and Human Services, we had not had much to do with him,” he told me. “Mitch McConnell has been a good friend of mine for a very long time – 30-35 years. He is exactly my age. For him to suffer polio the way he did at the very early age, and for somebody else to say the polio vaccine doesn’t work – well, if I were Mitch McConnell I would be pissed off about that too.”
I asked him – “Is there a concern for you or for other folks in the Heritage Foundation that here is a moment in history where there is an opportunity for the New Conservative Movement to finally achieve its agenda. But is there a concern that it could be marred, or stained, as a result of the botched execution by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? Telling people to stop taking vaccines, medications, not trusting doctors – people will die.”
“Well, think about how many people are dying already because of obesity, or red dye, or whatever – things that Kennedy has been so outspokenly opposed to,” he replied. “I’m never going to be somebody who anticipates what the media will say. I was at a conference today and I said in conclusion, ‘I’ve been around Washington long enough to know, there are no permanent defeats. But again, there are no permanent victories – just permanent battles. And every battle has to be fought in terms of the principles we believe in.”
“I am used to thinking about evidence,” I responded. “And I worry that at the end of the day it will not be political. Scientists will review all the data and they will add up the outcomes. And I worry that outcomes will become worse as a result of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s agenda. And I worry that this will put a stain on the conservative movement.”
“I certainly hope not, but you and I will certainly agree that evidence is black-and-white. If it’s black, it’s black. If it’s white, it’s white. You don’t change the evidence to fit your theory. If you are at Sloan-Kettering and the head of the department says, ‘you have a cancerous prostate, we have to take it out’ – you say, ‘Yes Sir, when can we do it?”
I told him about the day 1 Hep B vaccination and Bigtree’s fearmongering that may cause deaths decades later.
“You are absolutely right. The vaccines that have gone through appropriate clinical trials – it’s like polio and McConnell.”
