On certain subjects, it hardly sounds like John Kilian and Allison Cecil are part of the same political movement.
Kilian, a retired IT professional and nurse in Middletown, Conn., spent part of 2021 analyzing Covid immunization data for the U.S. Army, and he could clearly see the benefits. He’s worried about the vaccine hesitancy that led to the measles outbreak in 2019, and as he put it, it’s “a highly contagious disease and the risk-reward ratio favors vaccination.” He’s planning to get a flu shot. “The last time I got the flu was the last time I did not get a flu shot,” he said.
Cecil, a middle school teacher in Owensboro, Ky., is skeptical about the ingredients in vaccines. If she were to have another kid today, her answer to a number of recommended early-childhood shots would be “heck no.” Others, she’d have to think more about. She wouldn’t want her baby to get measles, but she also wouldn’t want to inject the child with substances she doesn’t trust the government to fully vet. “You can always vaccinate, but you can’t unvaccinate,” she said.
Yet they are both supporters of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — not just casual admirers, but committed enough to have organized campaign events. Their differences show how Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, or MAHA, has created a political home for the disaffected of various stripes.
It brings together former Bernie Sanders die-hards and evangelical MAGA supporters, stay-at-home parents and small-business entrepreneurs, mommy bloggers and bro podcasters, and is about more than just vaccines — though vaccines are a central argument. Many people are worried about a rise in chronic illnesses, scared disease may strike their family if it hasn’t already, and want a clear answer as to what’s driving the problem. Concerns about chemicals in food are high on the list, too.
Beneath all of those issues lurks a disturbing sense that the health care system and its regulators don’t have people’s best interests at heart. To MAHA fans, financial interests are keeping government officials, scientists, and health care providers from being forthright. Some see health guidance as dogma and feel the underlying data aren’t transparently shared, not even by scientific journals. They want such findings and recommendations debated, out in the open, even when they are largely considered settled science.
Now, with Kennedy set to be nominated as the next secretary of Health and Human Services, his followers hope that their government will start taking seriously their worries about vaccines, food, and pharmaceuticals. Formerly fringe concepts have potential to become policy. In some cases, though, MAHA fans also have fears about how Kennedy’s platform will fare under President-elect Donald Trump’s industry-friendly ethos.
Mistrust as a starting point
Some were first drawn to MAHA by chronic illness, a death in the family or the need to care for aging parents. For Ailyn Carmona, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the concerns began long before Kennedy’s presidential bid. Her mom had a major stroke in 1988 and spent decades in frequent contact with the health care system until her death in 2018. That gave Carmona an eyeful. Though she has known many caring and thoughtful clinicians, plenty of others didn’t deserve her trust.
Small oversights could turn into serious problems. Once, when her mother was at a long-term care facility, Carmona visited her late at night and noticed one of her hands was purple. Someone had left a tourniquet tied around her upper arm after drawing blood, Carmona alleges.
Another time, her mother was hospitalized for respiratory issues and clinicians swiftly sent her for a CT scan. Carmona told STAT she believes the scan damaged her mother’s pacemaker, and doctors had to rush her into surgery to put in a new one. Research suggests the chance of such problems happening with modern devices and machines is low, but not zero. “I personally think they were just, you know, running up the insurance bills,” she said. “I’m very biased based on personal experience.”
If those instances created sparks of mistrust, social media provided plenty of fuel. Why are cancer rates rising? What does fluoride do to the body? The questions took hold in her mind, and the answers she found eventually led her to RFK Jr. Carmona, who leans conservative, became convinced that the increase in cancers was spurred by issues with our food supply, that fluoride in drinking water numbs people’s ability to think critically. (A 2019 study controversially linked small decreases in children’s IQ to maternal fluoride exposure, but other researchers say the paper does not prove fluoridation caused the lower IQ scores, which were measured years later.)
Concerns about chemicals in our food are central to many MAHA adherents. That’s what first drew Marci Kenon of New York City to the movement. She read about the loophole through which companies can slip unvetted food additives onto the market by saying they’re “generally recognized as safe,” allowing chemicals into our meals that aren’t permitted in Europe, for instance. “This has pretty much grown into the food industry deciding what’s safe to put in our food supply,” said Kenon, who is a wellness educator and anti-toxins activist.
That worry is neither fringey nor right-wing. In fact, it’s widely shared. Professors of policy and nutrition at Harvard, New York University, and Tufts have written about it. Democratic Sens. Edward Markey, Elizabeth Warren, and Richard Blumenthal have introduced legislation to try to address it. The Food and Drug Administration announced earlier this year it plans to improve the review process for food additives.
Less accepted among public health experts is many MAHA fans’ mistrust of vaccines. Reams of data show that immunizations against diseases such as polio and measles are among the most effective medical tools we have. Many of Kennedy’s followers, though, say that safety data are hidden, inadequate, or missing. In other cases, they allege public health officials have obscured information on adverse events or ignored true cases of vaccine injury to protect pharmaceutical interests.
The pandemic as a tipping point
Covid was a baptism for many who number among MAHA’s ranks. Kenon did not get a Covid vaccine, even though her brother-in-law died early in the pandemic, in part because of fear over what mRNA, a key component of the Pfizer and Moderna shots, would do to her body. Carmona, too, found herself full of regret that she let her son, now 20, get all the recommended childhood vaccines as she watched a documentary by a right-wing commentator who called vaccines “poison.” She said if she had a child today, they would go unvaccinated.
For Shelly Cobb, 60, of Santa Barbara County, Calif., the pandemic provided a similar, transformative gateway. Her mother was a registered nurse, so she’d never questioned vaccines. But the new mRNA technique used in Covid shots gave her pause. When she asked her doctors about them, she found their answers unsatisfactory. From a video of Kennedy, she learned about the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which granted liability protections to the makers of vaccines and established a compensation program for people who are injured by vaccines.
“I was blown away,” she said — and she decided against getting a Covid shot. She lost friends and was kicked out of a book club as a result, even though she was willing to take tests and wear masks in order to make others feel comfortable. “I got treated like I was the devil,” said Cobb, a longtime Democrat and environmentalist. “I just felt very isolated and it was a very difficult time for me.”
Amid that loneliness, Kennedy’s presidential campaign announcement in April 2023 felt like an opening. She immediately signed up to volunteer, tabling at farmer’s markets, organizing an Earth Day event, and helping get Kennedy on the ballot in California. Cobb felt the kind of excitement she did when Bernie Sanders ran, yet she was even more thrilled by the idea that Kennedy could smooth over the political spikiness that strained relationships during Covid.
Even Kilian, who has seen the benefits of Covid vaccines, has some lingering pandemic misgivings. He thinks closing down schools may have done more harm than good, for instance. He has some questions about how HPV vaccines were tested. One thing that initially drew him to MAHA was the feeling that the Democratic Party, with which he identified, was excluding Kennedy. It made Kilian start to look into Kennedy’s claims more seriously.
As far as the election goes, Kilian says his emotions are mixed. He’s enthusiastic about Kennedy potentially getting to realize some ideas he agrees with, but he doesn’t trust Trump. “There’s thousands of lies that man has told,” Kilian said. Cobb is willing to get behind Trump if Kennedy is aligned with the president-elect.
“I voted for Kamala,” said Kenon. As a Black woman who lives in Spanish Harlem, she’s scared of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric — scared for her immigrant neighbors, and scared that people like her will get caught up in the raids. To her, the possibility of Kennedy as health secretary is a silver lining. With a self-described businessman in the Oval Office, will RFK actually be able to enact his policies to constrain Big Food? “This is going to be the 100-million dollar question,” she said.
