WASHINGTON — Nobody knew what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was going to say. Inside Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Ariz., a crowd howled as he walked onto a stage sizzling with pyrotechnics, the Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” blaring.
“I don’t think I’ve ever introduced anyone that got applause like he just got. I must tell you, it’s true,” said then-candidate Donald Trump.
Kennedy, a longtime Democrat, had ended his long-shot independent bid for the presidency hours before, and now here he was in the sweltering August heat, ready to make his endorsement of Trump official. “Don’t you want a safe environment for your children?” he asked, the crowd responding in agreement. “Don’t you want to know that the food that you’re feeding them is not filled with chemicals that are going to give them cancer and chronic disease?”
“And don’t you want a president that’s going to make America healthy again?”
On the sidelines, Kennedy campaign staff — some still upset by the failed bid and MAGA sign-on — realized something had just happened. “I was like, ‘That is so brilliant. Why didn’t we think of this before?’” Kennedy’s former chief of staff, Brigid Rasmussen, told STAT, recalling the day a year ago.
In that moment, Make America Healthy Again was born. Branded T-shirts and caps appeared online within days. #MAHA spread on social networks. Suddenly, people were talking about beef tallow. Then Kennedy won confirmation as HHS secretary in February, and MAHA turned from a clever slogan into a mandate ruling the nation’s giant health agencies.
STAT spoke with nearly two dozen people within and outside of MAHA to assess the movement’s growth and measure its accomplishments against its grand promises. We found a movement still fired up, but struggling to maintain cohesion as the internal dissonance of its ideologies intensifies and as it butts against external critics.
Kennedy, in his first six months leading an agency reeling from deep cuts, has already watered down or broken key promises, according to STAT’s analysis. Many of his other stated goals — like improving addiction recovery services, making HHS data more accessible to the public, and finalizing clinical trial diversity standards — have not been met. He has yet to outline a clear plan for reducing chronic disease beyond stoking public outrage and launching awareness campaigns.
One year in, much of the movement still centers on spinning a positive narrative around itself, shutting down criticism and discord, and persuading more people to claim the MAHA label. Enacting federal regulations to require, for example, less sodium or sugar in processed foods — an idea many nutrition researchers support — seems a distant concept. Investing in public health programs that help prevent or reduce rates of disease is happening only sparingly, and typically on a case-by-case basis. Many more initiatives have been stymied, shrunken, or cut entirely in Trump’s effort to downsize the government.
But MAHA undeniably still has momentum. It’s all over statehouses, in boardrooms, on the world’s most popular podcasts, and in social media feeds. It’s increasingly become a consumer movement forcing corporations’ hands, while feeding into a complicated cultural conversation about health and wellness, the limits of partisan politics, and who actually controls the country.
“HHS is delivering the most sweeping public health reforms in a generation that put families, not special interests, at the center of decision-making,” an HHS spokesperson said in a statement, highlighting how food companies have agreed to phase out synthetic dyes and states have removed soda from Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program offerings and de-fluoridated drinking water, among other initiatives. “Together, these wins mark the beginning of a new era in public health grounded in evidence, transparency, and an unwavering commitment to Make America Healthy Again.”
Behind the scenes, the movement has sprouted adult legs: at least three political action committees, one namesake think tank, and a corps of volunteers ready to further influence lawmakers. Increasingly, MAHA is becoming a kind of litmus test as politicians look to midterm elections next year. Leaders in the movement are quietly exchanging notes on who is a political friend or foe.
“They need to get with MAHA or they’re going to be voted out,” Michaela Bardossas of the Kennedy-connected group Moms Across America said of Republicans in Congress who won’t support pesticide regulation.
Several MAHA proponents told STAT that turning around the nation’s chronic disease epidemic will take years — they’re thinking about it as an 8-to-10-year fight — but that MAHA deserves praise for transforming the conversation in such a short amount of time.
“The administration should be getting credit for that,” said White House adviser Calley Means, who originally helped connect Kennedy and the Trump campaign. “Pediatricians are probably getting a lot more questions about the shots, about what the kids should be eating, about root-cause treatments. I think that’s a good thing.”
Many MAHA supporters in the trenches, too, give Kennedy high marks in his first year. Those who spoke to STAT were almost universally positive, particularly about the negotiations on synthetic food dyes and additives, the Operation Stork Speed initiative to improve the supply of infant formula, and overhauls to federal vaccine policy.
Where they took issue with the administration, it was often about the politics around pesticides or cuts to federal benefit programs, like food stamps. A draft version of the MAHA strategy report was leaked mid-August, and set off some in the movement with what they perceived as a friendly posture toward pesticides. This happened around the same time they were fighting legislation that would grant some legal protections to pesticide manufacturers. However, most prominent voices in the movement haven’t blamed Kennedy for that.
“We’re definitely not happy with a lot of the things the EPA has done,” Bardossas said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Others more directly point the finger at the health secretary. Some STAT spoke with had once been optimistic about potential nutrition reforms and a focus on chronic disease. Now they say Kennedy and MAHA have settled for low-hanging fruit and failed to show how they will take on the difficult project of improving public health.
Many — both fans and critics — also remain concerned about MAHA’s approach to vaccine regulation, research, and messaging. Some see an unleashing of Covid-era fury that threatens to undermine significant scientific achievements. Others are troubled by the slant toward “medical freedom” rhetoric by the people shaping HHS policy (including influencers). Many wonder whether Kennedy can enact his fairly radical vision of health while working under Trump.
“We talk about it as a unified movement, but it’s not. It’s a collection of different interests,” said Kathryn Olivarius, a Stanford professor who teaches the history of medicine and science.
Shaping the narrative
Depending on how one defines it, MAHA can be almost anything. The label is stretchy enough to include french fries (only beef tallow-fried) and supplements, Bernie Sanders-style roasts of corporate greed and meandering, and clavicle-baring Russell Brand rants. The latter has become a staple at MAHA gatherings, including a recent Washington happy hour and a Zoom call to rally Kennedy supporters.
There, Brand spoke about the movement’s goals before flashing his bare chest onscreen and paraphrasing a Bible verse. But his real task was commanding foot soldiers. “What I can say is that if you are able to give me content and access that is amenable to the expediency of our shared goals, I will do my best to ensure that it reaches people,” he said.
Leaders of the movement are well aware of the pressures Kennedy is facing, and so they have been building a network of major social media influencers like Brand to help shape public perception. Also on the call were Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, the biohacker Gary Brecka, and the physician-slash-media-personality Drew Pinsky. The focus lately is on showing a unified front, even on issues like vaccines.
The Aug. 6 call with influencers took place just one day after the secretary canceled $500 million in grants to develop mRNA vaccines — a decision widely panned by scientists and public health professionals as short-sighted, and celebrated by Kennedy’s core following. Tony Lyons, a vaccine skeptic book publisher funding Kennedy’s pursuits, urged people to post messages of support on social media.
“We all need to work as a team. We all need to find ways that we connect to each other and not try to look for ways that we disagree with each other,” Lyons told the group.
A look just under the surface shows MAHA organizers are spending significant amounts of time trying to keep different factions happy, or at least keep dissent at bay. The calls with Lyons happen every other week. There are tons of other meetings: formal and informal, dinners and coffees, roundtables and “MAHA tours,” calls and confrontations, and many, many an argument on the social platform X.
The organic farmers and the non-organic farmers want different things, while the medical freedom people want to burn things down, and the crunchy moms are vocal but have mixed views. That doesn’t even include the food people, some of whom just want more apples in low-income neighborhoods and others who want carnivore diets for all.
“It’s like a big family, like 20 different kids, all with different personalities,” said Jennifer Galardi, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Restoring American Wellness initiative.
Much of the work is simply maintaining appearances: HHS social media posts and press releases highlight Kennedy’s achievements while others, like Means, do the work of batting down criticism. The Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health have their own podcasts so agency heads there can shape their narrative. Negative headlines are used as proof that corporate interests are trying to keep Americans in poor health.
If the story in the early days of MAHA was that people in power are corrupt, now Kennedy and his clan are at the helm, so the message becomes: Outside forces are trying to divide the movement. “This is a war, we can win it, but we need all of you to be part of it,” Lyons said at the end of the Zoom.
While Lyons and others are working to shore up the media operation, which also includes a documentary filmmaking enterprise, MAHA leaders try to expand their reach. They want to bring in undecided and potential swing voters using fairly noncontroversial ideas.
A poll conducted this summer by the nonpartisan group End Chronic Disease (which has unofficial ties to the upper echelons of MAHA) shows some of Kennedy’s policies, such as removing ultra-processed foods and added sugars from school meals, retain broad support. A separate survey by NBC News reveals Kennedy’s ideas are taking hold, even if public opinion of him personally is still split.
“If women and independents and young people can stay in the Republican fold, it changes politics and it also gives more momentum to really drive change,” said Means, who runs the company Truemed, which helps people use health savings accounts to buy wellness products.
In recent weeks, there have even been rumors of discussions between MAHA leaders and health-focused Democrats like Cory Booker (D-N.J.). “The path is to persuade, to win people over, and to find enough room at the table for everybody,” said John Klar, who runs a small farm in Vermont and is involved with efforts to shape MAHA’s agenda on agriculture and food. Other Democrats may not want anything to do with the movement, Klar said, because helping out could mean giving a win to the GOP.
Still, several MAHA allies told STAT they want to continue blurring partisan lines, and push for health to be a top voting issue.
On vaccines, a return to form
Even as MAHA aims for easy wins, Kennedy has further alienated his movement from traditional science and medicine with his actions on vaccines. This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced it would release its own list of recommended vaccines for children, breaking with federal guidance the group now deems unreliable.
Robert Lustig, a pediatrician and metabolic health expert at the University of California, San Francisco, never aligned with Kennedy on vaccine issues, but he used to think he could see past that one area to appreciate MAHA’s other attributes. The first six months of Kennedy’s leadership has changed his mind.
“He is the most severe case of confirmation bias I have ever seen,” said Lustig. The two men had a half-hour phone call in December, Lustig said, during which Kennedy remained immovable on his vaccine-skeptical views.
“He believes what he believes, and he will go find the data that will support his view. Period,” said Lustig, who previously served as an adviser at Levels, the health technology company founded by surgeon general nominee Casey Means. (Means declined to comment.)
Kennedy’s doubts about vaccines are no secret. Even in his confirmation hearings, when confronted by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) with robust data showing the measles and hepatitis B vaccines don’t cause autism, Kennedy refused to declare his support for the shots.
Since taking office, Kennedy has changed Covid shot recommendations without consulting advisers, fired every member on a federal vaccine panel in order to replace them with vaccine skeptics and allies, and ended contracts for development of mRNA vaccines that experts say would be most efficient in another pandemic.
He has spread doubt about the efficacy, safety, and reliability of common vaccines, including during a large measles outbreak, and signaled that he wants to edit the list of recommended childhood vaccines, the adverse-events reporting system, and liability protection laws for vaccine manufacturers. All of these actions contradict pledges Kennedy made to senators like Cassidy during his confirmation hearings, when he vowed to maintain the same level of access to vaccines, “empower the scientists” at his agency, and promote continued use of childhood shots. Vaccination rates among American children continue to fall.
“When the secretary finds facts inconvenient, he simply ignores them. And that’s not the way a secretary of Health and Human Services should operate,” Peter Pitts, president and co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, told STAT. “The MAHA movement will not succeed if that continues to be true.”
Public health experts fear that MAHA’s dismissal of vaccines as powerful public health tools will further erode crumbling public trust in vaccination and lead to the reemergence of diseases like polio, which can cause paralysis and death. Measles cases in the U.S. broke records this summer, and at least three people have died of the preventable illness.
“America has killed children in the United States because of its policies and rhetoric around vaccines,” said Avenel Joseph, vice president of policy at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “Problematic is not even a deep enough word for that.”
Promises made, but have they been kept?
On some fronts, MAHA has made fast progress. SNAP waivers, for instance, have been adopted by many states to ban soda purchases with food stamps. Kennedy and Co. have also made headway with giants in the food and beverage industry, persuading some companies to replace petroleum-based food dyes with ones derived from plants, or switch to cane sugar as a sweetener. The administration has instructed medical schools to expand nutrition curriculum and will ramp up pressure next year to add more classes on the root causes of chronic disease, Means said.
New dietary guidelines, due later this year, will have the power to overhaul the kinds of food served in schools and other federally funded facilities. The new, MAHA-fied version is expected to highlight whole, unprocessed foods, call for further reductions in children’s consumption of sugar, and emphasize the nutritional value of meats and dairy products. HHS is also creating an official definition of unhealthy ultra-processed foods, which would clarify for consumers and researchers which packaged items are actually thought to increase the risk of disease.
However, a look at Kennedy’s track record reveals mixed results. Multiple policies he backed in recent years have gone by the wayside, or been diluted.
For instance, Kennedy has not convinced Trump to ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements, a move that would align the United States with nearly every other country in the world. Kennedy instead seems to be opting for a lighter touch: working with federal regulators to enforce advertising rules when it comes to social media influencers and telehealth companies pushing pharmaceuticals, per the leaked strategy report.
During a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Kennedy dodged a question about banning pharma ads. “He must be recognizing that there’s parts of his message that fit with this administration and parts that, at least at the moment, don’t, and he’s going to deemphasize,” said Rachel Meade, a Boston University professor who studies populist movements. “But it’s going to become increasingly hard.”
In some ways, MAHA leaders still talk as if they are out of power, she said — the same David-versus-Goliath framing that has worked so well for MAGA. “There’s a similar danger there of like, OK, you’re very much in power, what’s next? Can they continue just to critique for four years?” Meade said.
Part of the shifting goalposts is by design: MAHA needs to put forth ideas that align with Trump’s agenda. That’s “pro-business, pro-innovation, deregulatory, pro-patient-and-doctor, pro-farmer, and America-first,” Heidi Overton, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, said on a recent call with Kennedy supporters.
Still, the secretary has so far failed to get Congress to fund one of his major proposals — the Administration for a Healthy America, a central coordinating body for chronic disease work at HHS. Instead, with Kennedy’s support, cost-cutting czars slashed tens of thousands of workers, including ones who specialized in disease prevention or helped manage state-level health programs. Environmental regulators weakened rules meant to clean up the air, soil, and water (another of Kennedy’s focuses). U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that supplied fresh, local produce to schools and food banks have also suffered cuts.
And, perhaps most notably, MAHA is unfolding as 10 million Americans are slated to lose health coverage in coming years under Trump’s tax bill, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
“You took out all of this infrastructure that had been there, that maybe wasn’t working so great, but you took away a massive infrastructure and left him at potentially a deficit to build something new,” Jacqueline Capriotti, the former national director of chronic illness outreach for the Kennedy campaign, said. Capriotti’s son has multiple serious chronic conditions and relies on Medicaid.
Kennedy frequently speaks of corruption within the government, and a too-cozy relationship between industry and regulators. However, he has spent the first months of his tenure at HHS hosting roundtable discussions with industry representatives — everyone from hospital CEOs to corporate food executives. His deputies at the FDA, Commissioner Marty Makary and on-again-off-again Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research chief Vinay Prasad, conducted a well-received listening tour with biotechnology executives.
So far, the bark has been worse than the bite at FDA, said John Maraganore, the former CEO of the biotech company Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. But the overall disruption at federal health agencies has been “challenging, to say the least.”
“We need to see some things going in a more stable direction and a more trusted direction before we can be confident,” he said, adding that he’s on board with some ideas, like accelerated approval pathways and championing rare disease drugs.
Capriotti, who is a rare disease advocate, still supports Kennedy but has been disappointed by breakdowns in communication between the patient community and HHS. Some of that is due to the firing of workers who were serving as a point of contact for rare disease patients, she said. The result is delays — in clinical trials, in answers, and in treatments. “We don’t have time to start from scratch,” she said. (Already, rare disease patients are reporting that Trump crackdowns on foreign grant awards are getting in the way of needed research.)
Secrecy and unclear measures of success
Kennedy is conducting much of his MAHA revolution in secrecy. Large, ambitious ideas have been unveiled and then scarcely mentioned again.
For example, Kennedy said in April he would launch an international study of autism and determine the condition’s cause by September, mystifying and amusing researchers who’ve been trying for decades to crack the spectrum disorder. Kennedy later clarified the study would have “some answers” by the fall, but would take a while longer.
National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya then said the government was creating a new autism registry; HHS later walked that back. Even still, very little else is known about how the $50 million study is being run.
The “radical transparency” Kennedy called for at the agency has not come to fruition, based on conventional definitions of transparency. While he is by far the most visible and recognizable health secretary in modern history — a fact his supporters celebrate — the day-to-day inner workings of his agency are opaque.
A communications blackout in the early weeks of Kennedy’s tenure ended only to reveal numerous government databases and websites had been taken down or altered. Two weeks into the job, Kennedy cut off public participation in much of HHS’ decision-making process, effectively taking his agency’s deliberations behind closed doors.
After saying it would release conflict-of-interest disclosures for all new vaccine advisers, HHS backtracked on that promise last month. Minimal information has been made public about the new members’ financial ties or what ethics training they received. Some members of the panel have expressed anti-vaccine views, or have been paid for their involvement in lawsuits against vaccine makers. Per ethics rules, those advisers would need to recuse themselves from any decision in which they have a financial stake.
Kennedy most often appears in edited videos posted to HHS social media pages or on cable news shows, but he rarely hosts press conferences or takes questions from reporters. He is often flanked by Stefanie Spear, his principal deputy chief of staff and longtime confidante, who shepherds him away from the press. His calendar and HHS email address are not public.
In part because of these barriers, it is still unclear how Kennedy is measuring the success of his various initiatives. Some in MAHA told STAT it would make sense to track rates of cancer, obesity, diabetes, and other common conditions, since the ultimate task given by President Trump is to end the disease epidemic.
Others say the litany of state-level MAHA changes are proof of concept. HHS has so far not shared its own metric. Meanwhile, crisis levels of chronic illness blaze on. MAHA has to reach more rural settings and regular people, top advisers say — it can’t just be for the same choir of wealthy mothers and protein-guzzling influencers.
“At the end of the day, we’re going to have to measure success by statistics and data and getting our people healthier again,” West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey told STAT as he walked through a “MAHA Monday” farmers market on the National Mall earlier this month.
His state has for years ranked as one of the sickest in the country. Over 40% of West Virginians are estimated to have obesity. The state has heartily embraced MAHA, banning certain food dyes from school meals and pulling soda off of SNAP.
Still, everyone admits: There is a long way to go. West Virginia is projected to have the lowest life expectancy in the nation by 2050.
“There’s no other — rhetoric doesn’t matter,” Morrissey said.
STAT’s coverage of chronic health issues is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.
