Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump, encouraging his followers to vote for him in the presidential election under a new, slightly familiar slogan: “Make America Healthy Again.”
“Our big priority will be to clean up the public health agencies like the CDC, NIH, FDA, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” Kennedy said, referring to the pillars of federal public health regulation: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. He promised in a video announcing the campaign that began with him selling green "MAHA" hats and merch.
The MAHA Alliance super PAC gives new legs to the so-called medical freedom movement, in which Kennedy — an environmental activist who has made multiple false or misleading claims about vaccines but does not see himself as an anti-vaccine advocate — is seen as a leader. Although the movement has existed essentially since the country was founded, it reached a boiling point during the COVID-19 pandemic and in recent years has elected its backers to positions of power on the boards of hospitals and in local elections around the country. Anti-vaccine bills have also been making it further in state legislatures.
Once seen as a political movement on the margins, composed mostly of libertarians opposed to vaccines, the medical freedom movement has expanded to unite supporters across party lines, merging the far-right with what some have called the “crunchy granola” new-age alternative medicine voters on the far-left. It champions a platform that values personal liberties above the medical establishment and opposes government public health and regulatory agencies.
“I think Kennedy is trying to draw from both of those streams,” said Wendy Parmet, faculty co-director at the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University. “For Trump, obviously Kennedy is a potential way of reaching some anti-establishment groups that otherwise might think of themselves as on the left, because he also, unlike traditional Republicans, talks about environmentalism and clean food.”
In addition to vaccines, the movement also generally opposes federally mandated public health interventions and promotes alternative therapies and raw foods like unpasteurized milk, which Kennedy has said he drinks, despite the CDC recommending against it, especially as bird flu continues to infect hundreds of herds of dairy cows. Notably, the movement does not involve reproductive rights, but has been accused of appropriating slogans like "my body, my choice" in the abortion rights movement.
“The brilliance of the term, and the problem of the term, is it means different things to different people," Parmet told Salon in a phone interview.
Leah Wilson, the co-founder and executive director of Stand for Health Freedom, which supports candidates who align with the movement, said 40% of its members are registered Democrats. During the COVID pandemic, when mask mandates and vaccine recommendations became a political and divisive hot-button issue, the movement gained more momentum. In 2022 midterm elections, Stand for Health Freedom supported over 1,000 candidates in local and state races, Wilson said.
“It transcends party lines, it transcends socioeconomic status, it transcends racial diversity — all those things,” Wilson told Salon in a phone interview. “It's not specific to any one population, and I think that there's probably even more evidence of that post-COVID than there was prior.”
Trump has suggested that he would elect Kennedy to a position in his administration related to health if he wins the election, to the dismay of many scientists who consider the medical freedom movement a threat to public health and are concerned that anti-vaccine sentiments will lead to more deaths from infectious diseases.
Required childhood vaccinations for diseases like measles, polio and diphtheria decreased during the pandemic, with about 250,000 kindergartners not vaccinated for measles in the 2022-23 school year. In a measles outbreak in Ohio in 2022, the majority of 85 children infected were not vaccinated. Though no children died, 85 is a high number of cases for a disease as contagious as measles and 36 kids were hospitalized.
“Vaccines, over the last 100 years or so, have allowed us to live 30 years longer than we used to,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “There will be another pandemic, or pandemics, so will we be ready?”
Of course, it was precisely the COVID pandemic that poured gasoline on the idea that public health is untrustworthy. Ever since, public health has continued to be politically charged and public health messaging has continued to be challenged by elected officials — especially in Florida. In 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis created a committee to “investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine.” In February, Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo was met with backlash when he left it up to parents to decide if their child should go to school, going against the CDC’s recommendation to keep unvaccinated children home for the length of the incubation period for measles. Ladapo has also been accused of falsifying study data to make it seem like COVID vaccines are dangerous.
Changing messaging during the pandemic about masking, along with political division undermining regulatory agencies, increased the polarization of public health, said Rupali Limaye, an associate professor in public health at George Mason University.
“All of these things led to this distrust broadly in government, but also distrust really in health and public health, more importantly, because of how COVID-19 was handled,” Limaye told Salon in a phone interview.
“You have these things that are diametrically opposed, with one contingent of the government saying this is really important, but another one directly coming out and saying, ‘Don’t do it,’” Jerel M. Ezell, a researcher at the Cornell Center for Health Equity, told Salon in a phone interview.
“They’re creating space for some of these conspiratorial views to fester,” Ezell added, noting that public health agencies could do more to ensure their messaging is timely, direct and clear.
Kennedy has been vocal about his desire to defund the public health system, recommending in a September Wall Street Journal editorial to divert half the medical research budget to “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health.”
However, it’s not clear how some of Kennedy’s initiatives, like removing pesticides from food and improving water quality, would align in practice with Trump’s voting history, in which he has been resistant to regulating big polluting industries.
“When you focus on what RFK Jr. says is part of his Make America Healthy Again mission, it’s very hard to see how this aligns at all with what Trump, his supporters, and the Republican party are proposing,” Parmet said. “RFK Jr. wants to get rid of toxins and claims he is going to get rid of capture at the FDA, but how do you do this while you are also dismantling the regulatory state and appointing judges that disable regulators from regulating? … What is the magic device by which we’re going to get polluters to stop polluting?”
Trump previously offered Kennedy a health position that never realized, and some doubt he will actually appoint Kennedy should he win the election.
“I think that if Trump loses the election, RFK Jr. will become a footnote, but I do think the damage has already been done,” Ezell said. “Those seeds have already been planted in the whole anti-establishment thing that a lot of people love in this country. Trump and RFK Jr., they’re going to represent that for them.”
John Maldonado, a postdoctoral research associate at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, visited several medical freedom movement meetings in Pennsylvania as part of a research project in 2020.
“Some of the rallies that I was attending, even back then, it was sometimes difficult to differentiate between what degree these folks were primarily motivated by this medical freedom cause versus to what degree this was just the same standard Trumpism that we had seen up to that point,” Maldonado told Salon in a phone interview. “Some of these events were just so clearly partisan in a way that it often did not seem like a distinct sort of thing — even down to campaign merchandising.”
