The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is increasingly divided over President Kennedy’s unfulfilled promises and alliances with corporate interests. While some supporters share Kennedy’s fringe views on vaccines, germ theory, 5G, chemtrails and water fluoridation, others are focused on more mainstream goals such as improving food quality, reducing exposure to pollutants and limiting industry influence on public health. Growing disillusionment intensified ahead of the midterm elections, with a new scorecard alleging that most of Kennedy’s commitments to MAHA members remain unmet.
Some members of the movement support Kennedy’s fervent opposition to vaccines, rejection of germ theory and false claims that 5G damages the brain and causes cancer. Some, like Kennedy, also believe in chemtrails and want all mRNA vaccines banned. Others support his plan to prohibit water fluoridation and appear unconcerned about his false claims that Lyme disease was invented by the US military as a weapon.
Other supporters are drawn to MAHA’s more rational priorities. These include improving the quality of Americans’ food and diets, reducing exposure to environmental pollutants and limiting the influence of industry and corporate interests on public health, particularly the influence of pharmaceutical and chemical companies.
Because supporters have different priorities, Kennedy and other MAHA leaders have spent the past two years disappointing parts of the movement. Some, including Bowdon, are angry that President Kennedy has not banned mRNA vaccines. In February, Kennedy triggered a particularly strong backlash by accepting President Trump’s decision to increase domestic production of glyphosate, a pesticide that many MAHA participants had wanted to ban.
Kennedy further fueled feelings of betrayal in September when he attended a MAHA-branded summit with substantial corporate sponsorship from companies including Walmart, Anthropic, OpenAI, Grail and United Health.
“Rather than building its own revolving door, MAHA was supposed to expose the revolving door between money, industry, and government,” wrote Robert Malone, a fringe scientist and former Kennedy ally, in a scathing response to the summit.
Growing signs of disillusionment
As the midterm elections began on Tuesday, the number of disillusioned MAHA members grew. In October, former Kennedy supporter Tiffany Cianci announced the MAHA Scorecard, which lists 42 promises Kennedy and his leaders made to MAHA members and later mostly failed to fulfill.
The scorecard identifies 37 broken promises, five partially fulfilled promises and none that were fully kept. One commitment classified as “partially kept” involved removing synthetic colors from food, particularly food intended for children. President Kennedy announced the initiative with considerable publicity but later acknowledged that the FDA had not banned the dyes or secured formal agreements with food companies. Instead, Kennedy said there was an “understanding” with those companies, while the dyes remained in food.
Source: arstechnica.com