What MAHA can learn from engaging in public health

The last few weeks have been nothing short of disheartening for those of us who helped create the Make America Healthy Again movement, including a stupid executive order on glyphosate that seems anathema to what we fought for. I would be lying if I said my heart has not been inclined to repentance for the part I played in all of this. I helped Bobby Kennedy as a campaign volunteer, and when he joined then-candidate Donald Trump, I reluctantly decided that compromises were worth what I thought Kennedy could stand for within the walls of the Trump White House: the best solutions for a very sick and broken nation.

Yet I recently found myself, and reluctantly, heading to the citadel of arrogance: Washington (well, Arlington, Virginia, to be more precise). At the invitation of Brinda Adhikari, one of the hosts of the podcast “Why should I trust you? —I attended the annual meeting of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, where I spoke on a panel about engaging in civil conversation in a session titled “A Dialogue Between Academic Public Health and MAHA.”

Arriving at the hotel before the conference left me wondering if I had made the right choice. These are the opponents who have frustrated me during the pandemic. Despite my disappointment with the Trump administration on a multitude of issues, I continue to believe that MAHA is a good movement and that public health and health care in general need a major overhaul if they are ever to become trusted institutions again. I also realized that many of the people in the room were likely the unfortunate beneficiaries of the budget cuts implemented by the Trump administration, under the leadership of RFK Jr.. I felt unease about standing in front of a room that, in all likelihood, viewed my advocacy of Kennedy as part of its own moment of tumult.

The next morning, as I went down to the lobby for coffee, I walked past former NIH Director Francis Collins. I recognized it instantly and couldn’t help but think about Covid and all the harmful stories I associated it with. For a moment, the scenes of confinement and compulsory vaccination all flashed in my head. I don’t belong at this conferenceI said to myself.

But when the plenary session began, I felt something truly amazing: the room wanted to hear what my fellow MAHA advocates and I had to say. I’m sure the skeptics were scattered among the masses, but as we discussed public health challenges interacting with MAHA and the Kennedy leadership of HHS, the room seemed serious, ready to hear what was being said.

This was not a debate and I was not there to convince anyone that what I was saying should become the new gospel of health. But I could see in the eyes of many people present a recognition that what had happened over the past decade, particularly because of the pandemic, needed to be addressed.

We talked for an hour, and at the end, many audience members gathered around the stage to talk to my MAHA colleagues and me and learn more. I was delighted to see him. No angry, direct, Twitter-style battles were started. There was a real feeling that we should be learning from each other at this time, rather than building up our walls.

In my most honest moments, what I long for from the medical community is the chance to trust it again. We need medicine to function in all the splendor of its art. Patient care is one of the most necessary and human interactions of all humanity. Its politicization was therefore the worst possible outcome of an adventure of choice which never had to take the path of distrust.

Although the last few years have made me very skeptical of medicine, I have benefited from it. My oldest son was born three weeks early, and without the genius of the doctors and the care of the nurses, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, during the first month of his life, I certainly would have buried my child instead of celebrating his still thriving life.

I know we need medicine and medical caregivers to be a functioning and good society. I also know that we have a very broken system that seems to me, as an outside observer, to be beyond repair.

But in this room, I realized something deeply moving. The doctors and educators of this place are interested in the care and health of all those with whom they interact. They are not interested in being pill pushers or happy that our country is morbidly obese. They see the same problems I do and want them to improve.

It’s the people in power, those who work behind the scenes lobbying with money and influence, who want us to fight for intractable problems. The economic interests and beneficiaries of the current version of medicine love it when we talk about vaccines and big pharma, because it means they can continue to do exactly what they’ve always done.

But the room I was in was full of people who could achieve the results that I – that we all – want. They are the ones who connect with the most oppressed in our society, with the emergencies of bad choices and extraction that our market system perpetuates and celebrates in its boardrooms.

These advocates are the ones who have to sit down with a desperate Mississippi woman and try to help her understand what is happening to her body and why she feels sick. They are the ones who should try to educate people about the junk and processed foods that destroy their metabolism and hinder their full development. They are the ones who have to try to explain why their Medicare or Medicaid won’t help pay for the preventative measures they would benefit from, but will only give them the money they need for a pill or procedure when the disease has progressed too far. These are the ground troops for a war that must be won, and MAHA needs them.

During the discussion, emergency physician Craig Spencer asked for a show of hands.

“Who wants to eliminate processed foods for their children?

“Who wants toxins gone from our water and food supplies?

“Who wants good access to healthy, whole foods?

There wasn’t a hand that wasn’t raised.

The people of MAHA want the same things. They don’t want Kennedy to be relegated and boxed into a corner, just playing with his food coloring. The people of MAHA actually want a government that acts as a watchdog against corporate enrichment through human capital extraction through their anti-drug cycles. The grassroots are not interested in the corporate excuses that donors can perpetuate on people so they can continue to douse our food supplies with who knows what kind of witch’s brew. They reject the idea that the administration is tiptoeing around the perpetuation of a broken system with a long tweet in order to justify industrialized agriculture.

But this conference gave me a glimmer of hope: What if MAHA and public health actually came together on issues we know we can easily solve? What if both groups ignored the narrow prison of petty politics?

What if both groups agreed that government should be a stopgap to the lack of funding for research and testing, and eliminate the conflicts of interest that undermine the current system?

What if MAHA and public health leaders said Medicare and Medicaid should focus on preventive care and access to good nutrition?

What if the education system taught children to cook good food and cultivate a garden, even on an apartment balcony? What if society viewed health and education as synonymous endeavors, where children learn as much about how to take care of themselves as they do numeracy?

What if MAHA and public health agreed that being a whole person, spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was our society’s job?

Public health doctors and nurses holding the hand of a sick child are not the ones MAHA should be adversaries with. Instead, they – we – should work together. Build a bridge between the two groups to put the people back in their rightful place at the head of the republic. A place where their discretion is informed, where they take care of themselves, where they have the capacity to take care of themselves and their fellow human beings. Public health is a key ally in this next phase of a healthy population.

Aaron Everitt is a husband and father from Colorado. He is a freelance writer who focuses on topics related to American government and culture. He writes for his Substack, Outre la Révolution, where a version of this essay first appeared, and was active in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign as a volunteer.