Maha split shows all is not well with Kennedy’s US health revolution
Republicans worry Make America Healthy Again is an electoral liability while activists claim it has abandoned its values
Divisions within Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again movement risk damaging Republicans just as Maha prepares to test its political power for the first time at the midterm elections.
Grassroots supporters say the group they founded has been hijacked by corporate interests, while mainstream Republicans worry Maha’s anti-vaccination message could endanger the party’s candidates in close races.
The fight has burst into the open ahead of Maha’s health conference in Washington on September 29, in which nine public companies are scheduled to speak — more than double the number from last year — along with Trump administration officials. Corporate speakers also include artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic, which are pursuing trillion-dollar public listings, and insurance company UnitedHealth.
Some have expressed shock that Maha, which includes tax-exempt organisations as well as a political fundraising arm, requested up to $300,000 from corporate sponsors to speak on a panel and attend private gatherings with administration officials.
“That’s not Maha,” said Kelly Ryerson, a Kennedy devotee and co-founder of a regenerative agriculture non-profit. “Some of these things creeping in feel like classic lobbying and co-opting of a very popular movement. That’s frustrating.”
Maha loyalists complain that the grassroots movement has become increasingly hijacked by outside groups.
“The biohacker bros have pretty much moved on into the Maha movement,” said Zen Honeycutt, a Maha loyalist and head of the non-profit Moms Across America, which advocates against pesticides and genetically modified crops.
“The real mothers movement that created all of this, they do not use Neuralink and Crispr and GLP-1s and peptides and all kinds of biohacking things,” she said. “There is a very different type of person who has been the backbone of this movement and that is the mothers who have been using natural remedies.”
Maha began as a grassroots health crusade led by Kennedy focused on wellness and scepticism of vaccines, ultra-processed foods and the alleged corruption of the public health system by corporate interests. But it became an official government policy initiative when Kennedy — after abandoning his independent presidential run in 2024 and endorsing Donald Trump — was appointed health secretary by the president.
Now it is raising campaign contributions and rolling out cash to preferred candidates across the country, all Republicans. Kennedy, who according to Pew Research is the most popular secretary in Trump’s cabinet, has travelled to battleground states to campaign for the party.
However, the rhetoric that started a popular movement poses problems for Republican candidates, and few have embraced Kennedy as a campaign speaker as they fight a resurgent Democratic Party.
“If he is casting doubt about the efficacy of vaccines and insinuating that vaccines cause diseases, then he is a total loss for Republicans,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres.
The overwhelming majority of Americans believe vaccines have eliminated “utterly horrible diseases” such as polio and measles, he said. When he cast doubt on vaccines, Kennedy put “Republican candidates in a very uncomfortable position”.
Of all the election contests in November, the Iowa governor’s race is considered the most high-profile test of Maha’s political power. If Republican Zach Lahn wins, Maha could have long-term viability when Trump and Kennedy are out of office, Republicans have said privately. In August, Kennedy campaigned with Lahn in Iowa and he is listed as a speaker at Tuesday’s Maha event. Last Monday, Maha said it was giving $1mn in funding to Lahn’s campaign.
One of Lahn’s top campaign issues has been confronting “the cancer crisis” in his state and he has called for clean water reforms. Iowa has the highest incidence rate of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and leukaemia in the country on an age-adjusted basis, according to a February report from the University of Iowa.
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma has been linked to the weedkiller glyphosate, and Bayer — owner of Monsanto which makes the herbicide Roundup — has offered a $7.25bn settlement to resolve future claims by people who allege their cancer was caused by it.
“Nobody has been a bigger warrior for clean water than Bobby Kennedy Jr,” he said at the August campaign event. Lahn’s campaign did not respond to requests for an interview.
But Kennedy’s advocacy against herbicides failed to win over Trump, one of a string of setbacks for Maha this year that have come from the president himself.
In February, Trump signed an executive order promoting glyphosate as essential to the US agriculture economy. Kennedy supported the executive order, saying it protected an essential farming component.
Kennedy’s 2025 Maha report cited Bayer, Syngenta and BASF as funding favourable scientific research and spending millions on government lobbying over the issue. Kennedy’s apparent backtracking on glyphosate triggered a significant rift with members of his Maha community.
“It was an enormous blow,” Ryerson said, a Maha advocate who has known Kennedy since he was a trial attorney working on glyphosate litigation. A lot of Maha people “disengaged” after that executive order, she said.
“Each time we get a little bit of progress, industry quickly steps in and shuts it down,” she said. “I still am looking to Trump to take the leadership that he promised on pesticides on the stage when he combined forces with Bobby Kennedy.”
Ryerson and other Maha loyalists applauded a September 22 announcement that HHS would collaborate with the Environmental Protection Agency on glyphosate oversight.
As secretary of the Health and Human Services department, Kennedy controls a sprawling organisation with a budget of $1.7tn and 13 divisions, from the US drug regulator to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy and his allies lobbied Trump to nominate Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary to be head of the Food and Drug Administration.
Earlier this year, Makary and Kennedy fell foul of Trump on flavoured e-cigarettes. In 2025, they raised concerns about flavoured vaping imports from China at an event with then attorney-general Pam Bondi.
“Parents watch their kids sucking on these things, they assume they are OK, they don’t understand the addictive nature of it,” Kennedy said.
But in May, Trump strong-armed the FDA into approving mango- and blueberry-flavoured vapes popular with children. Days later, Makary stepped down as FDA commissioner in part as a result of the White House’s pressure on vapes.
Kennedy has also suffered defeats on vaccines, an issue on which he has long been a strident sceptic. Maha has railed against “messenger RNA,” the technology that powers biotech Moderna’s vaccines. In February, the FDA initially rejected Moderna’s testing for an mRNA flu vaccine. A week later, it reversed itself and allowed Moderna’s flu vaccine trial to proceed.
It is not clear what prompted the FDA’s reversal but Makary was summoned to the White House days after the agency’s initial rejection of Moderna’s trial. The Boston-based biotech’s shares have surged more than 500 per cent this year.
An HHS spokesperson said government speakers were not involved in the planning or sponsorship for the Maha summit and were not aware of the corporate sponsorship arrangements.
“HHS has turned Maha into action across food and nutrition, vaccine safety, research, environmental health, behavioural health and addiction, physical activity, rural health and chronic disease prevention,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said.
The tax-exempt Maha organisation running the conference said on its website that it did not co-ordinate with the government on sponsorship or planning the event.
Kennedy has scored victories this year, especially in elevating fringe medicines historically shunned by big pharmaceutical companies. In April, shares of psychedelics companies soared after Trump signed an executive order to increase access to these experimental drugs. Kennedy has also promoted the health benefits of unregulated peptides, and an FDA panel in July voted to broaden access for these drugs despite the agency’s own objections.
Still, these regulatory wins for psychedelics and peptides businesses underscore what some see as an overly cosy relationship between Kennedy’s Maha organisation and government rulemaking.
Both psychedelics and peptides businesses participated in the first Maha summit in November 2025 and have also sponsored Tuesday’s event. Kennedy’s son, Finn, spoke at the event last year, and he is now raising money to invest in various Maha-aligned businesses.
Amid the increasing corporate interactions with Maha, its diehard vaccine sceptics said they felt abandoned by the movement despite close ties with Kennedy personally.
“The medical freedom people who have been up in arms about the pandemic are not part of all this administration Maha effort at all,” said Mary Talley Bowden, a Houston-based doctor. “They are not including our issues in Maha.”
She said Maha had been “hijacked” by Calley Means, a former lobbyist who became a senior adviser at HHS. Means first introduced Kennedy to Trump and has steered Maha on food issues. Means is scheduled to speak on Tuesday.
The HHS said Means was “a relentless advocate for all of the secretary’s priorities”.
“Irrelevant outside attacks will not derail our work or diminish the historic progress HHS is delivering to Make America Healthy Again,” an HHS spokesperson said.
Bowden said food was not a priority when Kennedy started as secretary.
“We were all buzzing about the pandemic and the Covid shots,” she said. “We were all fired up about that. No one was fired up about food.”