What ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Gets Right and Wrong About Our Health

LESS THAN A year after launching his independent campaign for president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began shopping around his endorsement—and the loyalty of his small but significant base—to both major political parties in exchange for a cabinet position. Kamala Harris reportedly rejected a meeting with him outright. Donald Trump, however, has taken him up on the offer, announcing that in exchange for Kennedy’s endorsement, he’d let the anti-vaccine candidate “go wild” on health, food, and medicine if he wins a second term. Kennedy says Trump has promised him control of multiple government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—which includes the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—and the Department of Agriculture (USDA). Therefore, a hybrid anti-vax and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement was born: MAHA, short for “Make America Healthy Again.”

Supporting this movement to push Kennedy voters toward Trump is the MAHA Alliance, a Super PAC led by Del Bigtree, former communications director for the Kennedy campaign and CEO of the anti-vax group Informed Consent Action Network. The operation appears to be widely geared towards men, partnering with right-wing influencers like Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson who champion traditional masculinity, and aims to combine “the health-conscious, independent-minded voters with Trump’s proven ability to disrupt the status quo,” according to its mission statement. “This includes prioritizing regenerative agriculture, preserving natural habitats, and eliminating toxins from our food, water, and air.”

Some of MAHA’s goals sound pretty great in theory—especially during a time when public trust in the medical system and American food safety are so low. Incentivizing sustainable farming, improving soil health, protecting natural habitats, and cleaning up our air, water, and food are goals everyone should be able to get behind, paired with a viable policy strategy and leaders who are actually willing to take on the big oil and big agriculture lobbies to address our systemic environmental problems. But we should be “very skeptical” about Trump’s ability or intention to do those things, according to Marion Nestle, Ph.D., a professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at NYU, who was present at a recent MAHA roundtable event. Trump actually dismantled President Obama’s climate policies and rolled back over 100 rules governing clean air, water, wildlife and toxic chemicals, including removing protections from more than half the nation’s wetlands. “It would be great if we kept toxic pesticides out of our food supply, and agricultural supports went to food for people rather than feed for animals [going to] fuel for automobiles,” says Dr. Nestle. “Is he going to make any of this happen? We have no evidence that he can or will.”

As for Kennedy’s promise to get ultra-processed foods out of kids’ diets (“We’re creating a diabetes problem in our kids by giving them food that’s poison,” he said recently, adding that he’s going to “stop that”), Dr. Nestle agrees that she would certainly like to see kids eating healthier foods. “I’d like school meals to be universal, cooked from scratch, and supported with appropriate budgets,” she says. But again, MAHA is not saying how Trump would achieve that. We’ve already conducted studies meant to advise policymakers on how to approach ultra-processed foods, and none of this is mentioned in the plans. And when former First Lady Michelle Obama tried to make school lunches healthier as part of her combating childhood obesity platform, she faced a massive backlash from the right because the school cafeterias still lacked the budgets to make the healthy lunches actually taste good for kids. The Trump administration ended up dismantling the program and changing the rules—on Michelle Obama’s birthday, pointedly—to replace the fruits and vegetables on kids’ plates with more fries and pizza.

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The man who wants to make America healthy.

Meanwhile, other ideas being pushed by the movement and by Kennedy himself—like eroding public trust in vaccines and peddling pseudoscientific alternatives to vaccines—are downright dangerous to public health. In an October 25 post on X, Kennedy threatened to dismantle the entire FDA if Trump is elected, accusing the agency of “aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”

Many of these buzzwords he’s using—ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in particular—are just snake oil alternatives to the Covid vaccine that don’t work, and in some cases, actually kill people. Jennifer Nuzzo, Ph.D., Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, told me that Kennedy’s tweet “is straight from the anti-vaxxers’ playbook that aims to sow doubt about credible medical approaches in order to sell and profit from unproven alternative approaches.” She pointed to one analysis from the Center for Combating Digital Hate demonstrating that prominent anti-vaxxers, including Kennedy, make upwards of $36 million a year by spreading lies about FDA-approved vaccines and therapies. In one specific case, Kennedy’s vaccine misinformation led to a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed dozens of children.

Encouraging people to drink raw milk is another very dangerous health trend being promoted by supporters of the movement. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Fla.) recently waded into this one, tweeting a glass of unpasteurized milk with the caption, “Raw milk does a body good. Make America Healthy Again!” The problem is, by skipping the process of killing off harmful bacteria in milk, we are leaving it potentially contaminated with lethal pathogens. “Pasteurization has been one of the most effective public health measures ever, essentially ending the illnesses that used to come from drinking tainted milk,” explains Dr. Nestle. “Infectious diseases used to be the leading causes of death and disability among Americans. Public health measures effectively ended them. It makes no sense to bring them back.”

One thing MAHA gets somewhat right is addressing the serious health harms of microplastics and “forever chemicals,” which have been linked to chronic disease, heart attack, and stroke. It’s great that we’re starting to pay attention to those. Unfortunately, though, the Trump administration created a loophole during his final few months in office that allows companies to dodge having to report how many forever chemicals they’re discharging into the environment. And Project 2025—reportedly a blueprint for Trump’s second term—suggests he plans to further dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency’s rules limiting the dangerous pollutants being released into our drinking water.

It would, of course, be ideal to elect an administration that takes our health issues seriously and addresses their root causes, including the broader environmental concerns about our air, water, and food laid out on MAHA’s website. But dismantling the FDA and its safety guardrails, encouraging people to drink deadly unpasteurized milk, spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines, and putting blind faith in Trump to do a 180-degree flip on his own environmental policies are definitely not going to “make America healthy.” If anything, this plan is just going to kill people.