One of the truly remarkable—and depressing—things that I’ve observed since the longtime antivax activist who is now our Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., first coined the slogan “make America healthy again” whose abbreviation MAHA now stands for everything from antivax activism to promoting lots of supplements and even cancer quackery, with a dollop of science-based considerations of the effect of healthy diet and lifestyle as determinants of health in order to disguise the stench of pseudoscience, has been to watch how quickly MAHA has become normalized, to the point where a usually good news outlet, STAT News, buys into the normalization.
What do I mean? Last week, STAT News published two op-eds, one from a public health scientist and one from a MAHA activist, apparently in search of a “kumbaya” moment, asking not just “Can’t we all just get along?” but also, “What can public health learn from MAHA?” Don’t get me wrong. I’m usually all for opponents listening to each other and trying to find common ground as a basis for working together. Maybe there even is some common ground between MAHA and science-based public health, although I would argue that it is a lot less expansive than the editors of STAT News seem to think and almost completely ignores the real problems with MAHA with respect to science.
The first thing that must be understood is that MAHA is nothing more than a manifestation of RFK Jr.’s worldview, laundered for “respectability” politically and for consumption by the mainstream. That is why MAHA soft-pedals RFK Jr.’s antivax beliefs, in particular how he is most definitely coming for your vaccines and doing everything he can to eliminate as many vaccines as possible during his time in office. That being said, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t common areas shared by MAHA and public health that, besides being good public health policy, might peel some MAHA adherents away.
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The problem is that the MAHA believers don’t appreciate that MAHA is, at its heart, an ideology that can only work for you (barring another pandemic) if you are privileged and have sufficient resources to pay for what it advocates. They further don’t appreciate that they are not among the privileged few. If more of them could be persuaded to understand that, they might be reachable by a science-based public health approach. The problem is that MAHA and science-based public health can never just “get along” as long as the antivax and quackery at the heart of MAHA are not acknowledged and addressed in whatever dialogue between MAHA and public health there is that might tackle shared interests. Any article that fails to acknowledge the disinformation ecosystem that created MAHA, how MAHA was spawned by RFK Jr. as a title to wrap his antivax beliefs in, the better to hide them under the banner of “chronic disease,” better diet, more exercise, and a hostility to big pharma is missing a huge part of the point.
