Has MAGA killed MAHA?

Preface: I originally drafted this a little over a week ago. I set it aside to polish it later, and time got away from me. Things have shifted a bit, which is addressed at the end.

This substack is not usually political. My general purpose is take hot topics in health news and elaborate on them, or explain important research studies, or pick apart flawed arguments in science… from an objective and perhaps atypical lens. But we are in a day and age where politics influence health and science, and sometimes that is worth comment. So for my new readers especially, this is a bit of a detour.

That said… as I have commented on before, “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) has become synonymous with President Trump’s policies and the shifting of the Republican party to align with that. You could argue whether the MAGA policies of today are the same as those of a few years ago, but what we have today is what it is.

President Trump’s campaign for re-election in 2024 was ignited by joining forces with Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s own campaign for president. Mr. Kennedy’s campaign was focused on MAHA – Make America Healthy Again – and there were a lot of aspects of that, which would take a long time to rehash. Let’s just take two of them – vaccine safety and chemicals added to our food.

At first President Trump embraced all of this. Honestly, a lot of people voted for Trump because of MAHA alone. I know those people, and they are all over the country. These are honestly people that might have otherwise voted third party, so this is important. This also represents the conservative base of the party. This is not negligible. Trump gave now Secretary Kennedy latitude to do a lot of things to make the MAHA objectives happen. New leadership in HHS, including NIH, FDA, CDC, and CMS. Changes at CDC started to lay the groundwork for looking at vaccine safety with a new perspective rather than rubber stamping every new vaccine that came down the pike. Trump even signed an executive order asking for the vaccine schedule to be examined in light of similar nations (more comments from me about that here).

Suddenly… all of that has stalled. An activist judge in Massachusetts stayed everything at CDC regarding vaccine schedule changes and membership of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. There has been no official movement from the DOJ to appeal that decision, so right now, there is no ACIP, all schedule changes have been erased, and some of the lingering issues associated with that are still lingering. The recent nominee for CDC director is not exactly a medical freedom warrior – comments by Aaron Siri have elaborated on that. And there are those in the medical freedom movement that are skeptical of Surgeon General nominee Dr. Means. To be clear… there are those that believe that any progress made under Kennedy (re-thinking the vaccine schedule, bringing critical debate into the vaccine conversation) will be moot under Dr. Erica Schwartz (CDC director nominee).

Another curious event is when President Trump signed an order protecting the manufacturers of glyphosate as a “need” for the food supply…. And Secretary Kennedy went along with it, even though he has won lawsuits against these same manufacturers because of health harms. This is not a topic I’m involved in, but it did jump out as odd.

Yet another odd observation is that even the MAHA report lists many “victories” of Kennedy’s tenure as Secretary of HHS, but none of them relate to vaccine safety or mandates. Are those not listed as victories because they are currently blocked by a court, or are they not as important anymore?

So what happened?

Dr. Robert Malone has given several interviews since the district judge’s decision to stay ACIP membership and votes, and he has made some strong insinuations about what is actually going on. He has stated that someone on the inside, an advisor to the President, has decided that medical freedom and MAHA are no longer winning issues. And given current events, apparently war in the Middle East is a winning issue. This last point is curious because most medical freedom advocates are very libertarian in their political leanings, so most of them oppose war and miliary interventions. But that’s besides the point.

So why is medical freedom a losing issue all of a sudden? Is Trump’s team completely unaware of the impact of Kennedy’s role in the presidential re-election? Why have they completely changed course on these things? And if MAGA is truly killing MAHA, will it really have the effect on the midterm elections that they think? I honestly think the opposite. You throw a bunch of your base “under the bus” in the words of Dr. Malone, do you really think you are replacing them plus more? How does that math work?

Epilogue:

I drafted the above text a couple weeks ago. In the last few days, President Trump has a new nominee for Surgeon General. I’m embarrassed to say that I know nothing about her (I did know a little about Dr. Means), but thankfully, Dr. Malone has written a very insightful substack about this new nominee.

Dr. Malone’s recent substack also notes that the federal government has filed a Notice of Appeal regarding the aforementioned AAP vs Kennedy suit. Interesting timing alongside the recent change in Surgeon General nominee, and Dr. Malone notes that coincidence too. May primaries are almost upon us… maybe that will be a more important indicator than some politicos originally thought.

Lastly, it is worth noting the Luna amendment removing liability protections from pesticide makers. These three things almost suggest that maybe the tide has shifted somewhat since I read the tea leaves a few weeks ago.