Elon Musk has gone – but there is an even bigger danger in the White House now
As one controversial character exits his post, there is another one just getting started. Alex Hannaford looks at the rise of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s ‘Maha’ movement and why some of its wild claims rooted in conspiracy theories could be devastating
Before he set foot in 200 Independence Avenue, Washington DC, Robert F Kennedy Jr, US president Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, had raised more than a few eyebrows from America’s medical establishment. Around 17,000, to be precise – that’s how many doctors signed a letter from the Committee to Protect Health Care urging senators to reject his nomination, saying he was “unqualified to lead” and was “actively dangerous”.
Their petition failed. Today, Kennedy Jr, better known as RFK, is head of an agency with an almost two trillion-dollar budget and a little over 80,000 employees. Last week, Trump unveiled The Maha Report, the administration’s blueprint for “making our children healthy again”. This report reflected Kennedy’s most contentious views on vaccines, pesticides, prescription drugs, and a description of America’s children as overmedicated and undernourished.
“Never in American history has the federal government taken a position on public health like this,” Kennedy told a group of supporters. The Washington Post reported that medical experts said some of its suggestions “stretched the limits of science”.
In an interview to coincide with its release, Kennedy said parents should be sceptical of “any medical advice” and should “do their own research” – something Kennedy critics say amounts to a dangerous rejection of scientific consensus; a call for Americans to replace peer-reviewed evidence with internet rabbit holes. As one critic noted, researching a vaccine isn’t like shopping for a toaster. But in Kennedy’s world, health policy becomes a choose-your-own-adventure, and critics say the consequences for public trust and child health are real.
The mission of Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services is to “enhance the health and wellbeing of all Americans by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services”.
Yet Kennedy is one of America’s leading vaccine conspiracy theorists, even campaigning against the Covid shot designed to help stem the tide of a disease that has killed more than seven million worldwide. In 2021, Instagram disabled his account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the vaccine.
Since releasing the report, which cited hundreds of studies, critics have found that some of those studies did not actually exist, something which has now been acknowledged by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. However, while she told reporters this week that the report will be updated, she doubled in her defence of RFK’s vision, saying: “It does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government.”
The rise of the so-called Maha movement within the Trump administration is, according to its some, a chilling embrace of figures and ideologies that undermine established public health principles.
Earlier this month, Trump announced his nominee for surgeon general: Casey Means, a medical doctor who dropped out of her surgical residency due to disillusionment with healthcare and who subsequently chose to practise functional medicine, a form of alternative medicine, and is now known for her “wellness” advocacy.
Among Kennedy’s many claims: that vaccines cause autism; that psychiatric drugs cause mass shootings; that HIV is not the cause of Aids and instead it’s due to recreational drug use. He has said Covid was “targeted to attack caucasians and Black people” and argued that exposure to pesticides is a cause of gender dysphoria.
In early May, during a televised town hall, he claimed, without evidence, that Darpa, the US Defence Department’s research and development arm, is spraying Americans with chemicals via jet fuel, reviving long-debunked “chemtrail” conspiracy theories. He has also made controversial statements about raw milk and fluoride in drinking water (Florida governor Ron DeSantis just signed a bill banning the addition of fluoride to public water supplies, making Florida only the second state to outlaw a practice long considered a cornerstone of public health).
Since taking office, Kennedy has fired 10,000 staffers – before admitting some programmes were mistakenly cut and would be reinstated. A couple of weeks back, he appeared before Congress to ask for less money for the agency, planning drastic cuts in line with Trump’s agenda.
Like Kennedy, Casey Means is sceptical about vaccine safety and calls for more research on their cumulative effects, despite there being no evidence that the current Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) schedule is unsafe.
Timothy Caulfield is a health law and science policy professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, and an expert in debunking pseudoscience in wellness culture. He is convinced the Maha movement at the centre of the US government will do harm for generations to come. “Their erosion in trust in scientific institutions is tremendously damaging,” Caulfield says.
Following the disruption of the Trump administration, it was reported that 75 per cent of scientists who responded to a survey in Nature were planning to leave the country, with Europe and Canada among the top choices for relocation.
“One of my greatest fears is the degree to which they’re undermining institutions like the National Institutes of Health and the CDC, which is going to make it more difficult to point to the truth,” Caulfield says. “[Kennedy’s] resurrection of the lie around vaccines and autism is a really good example of this because he tries to position himself and his team as being on the high ground.”
There have been more measles cases in the US during the first three months of 2025 than in all of 2024, according to the CDC. While Kennedy seems to have made a volte-face on vaccinations, acknowledging recently that they are the best way to avoid spreading measles, he has also downplayed the seriousness of infections, actions experts see as damaging confidence in vaccines.
The roots of this scepticism lie with former British doctor Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register after his 1998 paper suggesting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism sparked a major health scare. I interviewed Wakefield some years ago and he remained defiant, despite his discredited idea that there’s an autism-vaccine link. His distrust of the medical establishment has found a new platform in Maha.
Caulfield adds that having people who trained as medical doctors can make the movement seem more legitimate. He points to Dr Mehmet Oz, a TV staple of American daytime television, who Trump recently nominated as the administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, government programmes that provide health insurance for pensioners and people on low incomes. “Dr Oz almost made it noble to open your mind to embracing fringe ideas and disproven ideas,” Caulfield says. Oz has promoted the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid.
If Kennedy, Means and Dr Oz are the political wing of the Maha movement, the “crunchy mums” are its foot soldiers.
A loosely defined but increasingly vocal group, they’re just as likely to be found on Instagram as in a food co-op, posting about raw milk, cloth diapers, or the dangers of seed oils. But what began as a subculture rooted in environmentalism and food equity has morphed into a more politicised movement that blends wellness, parental autonomy, and deep mistrust of mainstream medicine. And Kennedy is their leader.
His anti-establishment rhetoric against Big Pharma, food additives, and what he sees as the corrupt medical-industrial complex, has found fertile ground among mothers who feel dismissed or ridiculed by conventional health authorities. For them, it’s about reasserting control over their families’ health in a system they no longer trust. Kennedy speaks their language and validates their deepest fears.
But his critics warn of the real-world consequences of promoting medical misinformation.
Jonathan Jarry is a science communicator with McGill University’s Office for Science and Society. He says RFK is part of a much larger wellness movement that has, for many years now, told people what they should blame for their health problems.
“Basically, modernity itself has been turned into the bogeyman,” Jarry says. “Everything that screams modernity, like pesticides and food dyes and even vaccines. Anything that your grandma didn’t have access to.”
But, Jarry says, there’s always a kernel of truth buried inside the messaging from Maha – that’s what makes it so effective. Of course, there are issues with ultra-processed foods. And so when people hear RFK and other Maha leaders identify a problem, it often has a ring of truth to it. “People say, ‘Finally he’s talking about this thing we knew was bad,’” Jarry says. “But the problem is that the solution they’re offering is completely wrong. That’s what happens when you have somebody who says, ‘I see your pain and I know what’s causing it; I know what we can blame for this, so follow me and together we will enact the right solutions even when those solutions are completely pseudo-scientific.’”
Jarry says we know what it takes to be healthy, and none of this is revolutionary. Of course, there’s a kernel of truth in the idea that corporations don’t necessarily have our best interests at heart. “But [Kennedy] will demonise the entire pharmaceutical industry and anybody who works in health regulation or vaccine development. And that can be appealing to people looking at these giant institutions that are raking in millions and millions of dollars, thinking there’s something wrong there.”
Dr Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and an expert on vaccines, told Mother Jones magazine that he was deeply concerned that the vaccine ecosystem “could collapse and we could see polio in the wastewater and the return of regular measles and pertussis outbreaks”.
Jarry says he shares Hotez’s fear. “I think that it is very likely that we’re going to see a resurgence of vaccine-preventable illnesses. We’re already seeing what’s happening with measles and there’s going to be more. And unfortunately, these diseases don’t stop at the border. And so there will be ripple effects on other countries throughout the world.
“Add to that the complete evisceration of the biomedical research funding apparatus in the United States … and [I think] we’re going to go backwards to a time when these infections were spreading routinely and people are going to suffer and die for no good reason. And this is what’s really horrifying.”
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