The Trouble with MAHA

The origins and current aims of MAHA and MAGA are fundamentally at odds with one another.

Vaccination pioneer Dr. Robert Malone identifies great contradictions between the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movements in an interesting and informative article at The Misesian from this past June, which I’ve just run across and think is very important to current discussions of health care policy. Malone is the inventor of mRNA vaccination technology, DNA vaccination, and multiple nonviral DNA and RNA/mRNA delivery technologies.

The distinguished doctor-scientist finds both the origins and current aims of MAHA and MAGA to be fundamentally at odds with one another: “they have different constituencies and different drivers,” Malone writes. The two movements “resolve into proregulatory big government initiatives versus promotion of deregulation and small government,” Malone observes. “In theory, Make America Great Again is more aligned with libertarian principles. Make America Healthy Again, in my opinion, is much more aligned with big government and regulation.”

MAHA originated on the left and is still on that side of the political divide, with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lifelong Democrat, as its current political spearhead, Malone writes:

For this discussion, I’m primarily concerned with the MAHA directives within the government, but MAHA is much bigger than that. I just want to make that key point: it’s bigger than Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s been going on for years. And in many ways, it was Calley and Casey Means, through a series of interviews, including, I think, four hits on Tucker and one on Rogan, that really brought this to the fore. In their logic, for example, Big Food and Big Ag have been contaminated with the money from Philip Morris that was required to be moved out of Big Tobacco and was moved into Big Food. And in Calley and Casey Means’s thesis, Big Food and Big Ag applied the marketing strategies and approach that had characterized Big Tobacco, making for an addicted consumer base, as a great business model. When you see a lot of the activities that are associated with Big Food and Big Ag, it’s hard to escape the underlying truth of that metaphor. …

Now, MAHA as we know it now has emerged mainly from the left out of frustration with the Democratic Party’s corruption and rejection, and it has embraced the center-right.

The center-right has largely returned the compliment, embracing MAHA, Malone notes. (Malone himself was “very close” to Kennedy’s political campaign team last year, he acknowledges.) “So, MAHA originates from the left, but the appeal crosses all party lines. Who does not want to be more healthy?” Malone writes.

MAHA remains a movement of the left and looks directly to the federal government to solve the American people’s health problems, Malone notes:

At its core, MAHA is predominantly proregulation. Let that sink in. The logic is that we must use regulatory authority to improve transparency and eliminate that which leads to unhealthy outcomes. Examples include drugs with side effects that, when considered in whole, do not have a strongly favorable risk-benefit ratio, an example being glyphosate (or Roundup) contamination of our grain and soybeans. Of course, recently, we have the removal of food dyes. However, there’s also a deregulatory aspect to the MAHA movement. For example, is unpasteurized milk really a health risk? What health-promoting properties are associated with unpasteurized milk?

Similarly, there is the move toward backyard poultry and eating locally slaughtered grass-fed beef, and reexamination of the widespread US policy of fluoridating municipal water supplies. These are all pushes against big government mandates. There’s also an investigational research aspect. For example, what are the drivers behind the explosion of autism, obesity, and other childhood chronic diseases? This is the explicit mandate coming from Donald Trump through the MAHA Commission. To date, the MAHA movement has primarily focused on things that big government can do to promote improved health. This is where MAHA is going currently.

The “deregulatory” elements Malone cites are actually calls for the federal government to override state and local laws restricting various food-production and sales practices and other health-affecting goods and services. These proposals would not reduce government power but expand it and concentrate it on the federal level. Though Malone does not make that distinction in his article, I think my recognition of it buttresses his case.

MAHA proponents oppose countless past decisions by the Food and Drug Administration to approve the manufacture, sale, and use of various products, along with federal agencies’ decisions to expand the schedule of recommended vaccines for children, Malone notes. Those very decisions, however, and the agencies’ refusal to revisit them, represent the very danger MAHA is courting in pressing for greater federal government intervention. Malone writes,

The whole structure of the approval process is driven by approving the thing in front of them right now, not going back and looking at whether or not there’ve been interactions between any of these drugs or compounds or vaccines, whether or not that decision was a good decision, or whether or not they missed some long-term safety signal because they were only looking at short-term data. It’s not done because that is kind of fundamental to the nature of bureaucracy. Once they make a decision, they don’t ever want to revisit it. It becomes locked in stone, and they move forward from that.

A derivative of this is that behind the potential of the MAHA initiative to improve our lives, and, importantly, improve childhood chronic disease, is the threat that if this gets institutionalized and bureaucratized, it will morph into another overbearing set of state mandates. There is no way to avoid that.

MAHA is nothing like MAGA. It would lead to an enormous further expansion of federal government power and the removal of any remaining decision-making ability from the American people and their doctors in health matters. Malone urges his readers to push for serious limits on MAHA:

And, basically, my talk here is a plea to you folks, who are kind of at the tip of the spear concerning bureaucracy and the administrative state. We need you. We need your intellectual input to help set the boundaries and parameters around the MAHA initiative. It’s not being done right now. Nobody’s talking about what the proper boundary should be. We seem to have a consensus that this is necessary. That actually is debatable, but that is the current consensus. But no one is talking about what happens once the administrative state gets its teeth into this initiative.

Malone provides much additional useful information about MAHA issues and how the “modern public health enterprise” “seeks to optimize collective health outcomes rather than optimizing health opportunities coupled with respect for individual autonomy and choice—which is what I advocate.” The article is well worth reading in its entirety.