Some within the movement embrace (or at least accept) Kennedy’s fringe beliefs, such as his zealous anti-vaccine views, his rejection of germ theory, and his false claim that 5G is damaging our brains and causing cancer. Some also believe, like Kennedy, in chemtrails and want all mRNA vaccines banned. There are members who support his plan to ban water fluoridation and also seem fine with his false claim that Lyme disease was created by the US military as a military weapon.
Others, meanwhile, have been attracted to MAHA by the more reasonable, non-absurd issues Kennedy touts. Those include improving the quality of Americans’ food and diets, reducing their exposure to environmental contaminants, and limiting the influence of industry and corporate interests on Americans’ health, particularly limiting the sway of pharmaceutical and chemical companies.
With various priorities, Kennedy and MAHA leaders have spent the past two years finding ways to disappoint their members. Some like Bowdon are angered that Kennedy has yet to ban mRNA vaccines. In February, Kennedy sparked particularly intense backlash among supporters for embracing Trump’s decision to increase domestic production of the pesticide glyphosate—a pesticide many in the MAHA movement wanted banned. Kennedy further fueled feelings of betrayal in September by appearing at a MAHA-branded summit that had hefty corporate sponsorships, including from behemoths such as Walmart, Anthropic, OpenAI, Grail, and UnitedHealth.
“MAHA was supposed to expose the revolving door between money, industry and government, not build its own,” Robert Malone, a fringe scientist and previous Kennedy ally, wrote in a scathing response to the summit.
Signs of dying
Going into the midterms on Tuesday, the number of disenchanted MAHA members had mounted. In October, Tiffany Cianci, a former Kennedy supporter, published a MAHA scorecard, which lists 42 promises that Kennedy and leaders made to the MAHA members and then largely broke. The scorecard reports 37 promises broken, five partially fulfilled, and zero kept. One of the “partially kept” promises was removing synthetic dyes from foods, particularly children’s foods. Kennedy announced an effort to do that—with much ballyhoo—but later admitted that the FDA did not ban or even have an agreement with food companies to remove the dyes. Instead, Kennedy said he has an “understanding” with food companies. The dyes remain in foods.