RFK’s MAHA Summit proves MAHA truly is just MAGA for your health

Nearly two years into his current position as secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s unlikely ascendance still seems like a paradox—or at least a dark joke. Somehow, a person best known for being one of the world’s loudest vaccine skeptics, eating an entire weird zoo’s worth of roadkill, and having a literal brain worm stands at the helm of the U.S. government approach to health, of all things.

As the political scion’s second annual MAHA Summit proves, however, Kennedy is actually the platonic ideal of an HHS secretary for the second Trump administration. With its conspiratorial bent, dangerous misinformation, and embrace of sex offenders, Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement is every bit as toxic as the MAGA mission that put it into power.

And similar to MAGA fans right now, Kennedy’s supporters are starting to feel betrayed.

The grift that keeps on grifting

The MAHA Summit is an annual daylong symposium celebrating the movement’s public health and regulatory reforms, and strenuously avoiding discussions about the resurgence of measles under Kennedy’s watch. Participants include federal administration officials such as Vice President JD Vance and Dr. Oz (who, in case you forgot, leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), along with tech and healthcare executives, researchers, “wellness” “experts”, and celebrities who are popular with increasingly narrow demographics.

Beyond its public-facing purpose, the event also presents a golden opportunity for corporations to potentially grease the wheels of the U.S. government—despite the fact that MAHA formed at least partly as a response to the alleged corporate capture of the Food and Drug Administration— that sneaking suspicion shared by many that food and pharma companies held too much sway over what consumers… consume.

a longstanding suspicion that corporate influence had compromised public-health regulators—including the FDA—leaving s with too much sway over decisions meant to protect consumers.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/04/24/maha-movement-food-reform-conservative-moms/

While some attendees at last year’s inaugural Summit reportedly speculated about which companies had sponsored the conference and whether they’d skewed the agenda, the speculation this year hit a much higher pitch. As a recent Bloomberg report uncovered, MAHA Center, the nonprofit behind the Summit, circulated sponsorship packages to companies, the highest tier of which was said to offer speaking slots with input into panels and topics, not to mention a cozy dinner for 30 guests with Kennedy and Oz, for as much as $300,000. Companies who ponied up include OpenAI, Anthropic, Hims & Hers, and Walmart—the last of which MAHA adherents might find particularly galling as Walmart is the U.S.’s largest seller of ultraprocessed foods, a category Kennedy’s HHS has tried and failed to regulate.

The corporate bonanza is not unlike when Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy offered sponsorship opportunities for his reality TV show earlier this year. In that instance, several of the sponsors included major transportation and travel entities that Duffy’s department regulates, including Boeing, Toyota, United Airlines, and Shell. The MAHA Summit goes a step further, though, with several corporate sponsors actively seeking government approvals, including psychedelic drug makers Compass Pathways, Definium Therapeutics, and Helus Pharma.

Of course, this should all be expected in an administration where Donald Trump can make billions in crypto while also “regulating” the crypto industry.

Everything is a conspiracy—except for this, of course

Something else MAHA shares with MAGA is the tendency to present nearly every pressing issue as a conspiracy, and the movement’s stars as brave truth tellers. In this framing, Kennedy and his cohort are the only ones willing to tell you what they don’t want you to know.

“They’re going after Bobby Kennedy because they say he’s dangerous,” one panel moderator said, for instance, “and we know what he’s a danger to… The people, the companies, the deep-state actors who are roadblocks to real progress.”

For Trump, this conspiratorial tendency manifested in hostility to the press, something Kennedy has seized on as well. As CNN continues fighting to rescind its ban from covering the White House, most mainstream press outlets were not granted press credentials to cover the MAHA Summit. Among those outlets allowed in was the Trump-friendly Newsmax, whose reporter noted of the event on X, “There’s barely any overweight, fat people in attendance.”

The array of brave truth tellers Newsmax and its ilk had the privilege of seeing up close included Bryan Johnson, the mortality skeptic who was on hand to provide “biological age testing” for gullible attendees; alternative health advice from Eric Berg, a chiropractor who’s branded himself “The Knowledge Doc”; and a panel moderated by Skyhorse Publishing owner Tony Lyons, who has put out books such as 2020’s The Case Against Masks by Dr. Judy Mikovits (note the year of publication) and 2021’s The Real Anthony Fauci by Kennedy himself, who has received an eyebrow-raising $4 million in book advances from Skyhorse in recent years.

Kennedy’s wife, former Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, was also at the Summit with what was billed as an “exciting announcement,” a slate of upcoming and presumably sponsor-courting MAHA events including a MAHA Retreat, MAHA Symposiums, and a music festival called Healthy Again. (Shortly afterward, on Fox News, Kennedy would cite Hines’s friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell as the reason Kennedy rode aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s jet multiple times.)

But these courageous speakers weren’t even the most notable guests on the lineup.

Abusers are welcome

Convicted rapist and former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson participated in a panel to discuss the “MAHA athlete,” which seems to refer to athletes who eat beef tallow. The event followed Tyson’s appearance in a Super Bowl ad earlier this year, featuring Tyson condemning the scourge of processed foods.

Some might contend Tyson’s rape conviction happened so long ago—he was sentenced to six years in prison in March of 1992—that having him speak at a U.S. government-affiliated event does not smack of valorizing abusers and shaming their victims. Anyone making that argument, however, would also have to answer for the Summit appearance of comedian and prolific alleged rapist Russell Brand, who moderated a panel on… Medicare and Medicaid. (Presumably, all better-qualified comedians/public health experts were unavailable.)

While the event’s facilitators initially seemed to sidestep the many accusations against Brand—including one speaker who referred to him as a “heartthrob”—Brand addressed the allegations directly. Dr. Oz, who appeared alongside Brand, introduced him by inexplicably mentioning that Brand had just been backstage “hugging” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, to which Brand replied, “She initiated that contact, Doctor.”

Oz then laughed so hard at the joke he’d obviously agreed to provide the setup for, he slapped both knees.

Rolling out the red carpet for accused and convicted sex offenders aligns perfectly with both Trump’s documented history of alleged abuse and his willingness to stand up for fellow alleged abusers—as he did perhaps most recently with the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, whom his administration helped flee from Romania, where they were charged with human trafficking and rape. (The administration has not yet intervened, though, in the Tates’s more recent arrest on dozens of charges in the United Kingdom, including human trafficking and rape.)

Mirroring Trump’s communion with accused sex criminals would reflect poorly on the MAHA movement at any time, especially given that Kennedy has his own set of abuse accusations to answer for. It’s particularly galling at this moment, however, with the prosecution of the “Cornell Seven” for alleged gang rape unfolding in real time in the background.

Dance without the one who brung ya

Some proponents of MAHA objected to the Summit for not being quacky enough, but most of the complaints came from a different feeling of betrayal. MAHA had sold out.

It’s hard to square the initial mission of MAHA—bypassing government and corporate gatekeepers to access untapped or unconventional pathways to wellness—with some of Kennedy’s current pursuits. At a separate MfAHA event the night before the Summit, for example, Kennedy pushed the idea of using AI to collect, share and analyze Americans’ health data. Despite a reporter from somehow-real media company LindellTV describing the proposed initiative as “technology designed to put patients in control of their own health records,” it sure sounds a lot like tech designed to make patients surrender their most private and sensitive data to the government and possibly corporations. It’s the kind of thing that might leave OG MAHA supporters as disenchanted as the Trump voters who hoped for lower gas and grocery prices.

The problem with leading from an outsider position is that coming into power means being an insider. Just as Trump once railed against other presidents for being too kind to China, only to fawn over President Xi on his recent U.S. visit, Kennedy has gone from lashing out against the healthcare industry to letting UnitedHealth present itself as a MAHA ally at this year’s Summit.

Perhaps the allure of telling people what some vague, nefarious “they” doesn’t want them to know inevitably loses some luster once you yourself become the they.

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