What “Making America Healthy Again” means to UPHE
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, has been leading a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement that has received a great deal of national attention. UPHE would like to clarify the distinction between our advocacy to protect public health and what MAHA movement consists of and how on a broader level the policies of the current administration are affecting public health.
There are valid criticisms of the American healthcare system, such as its ties to the pharmaceutical industry, its cost, and the political impasse that is preventing healthcare being granted to all citizens. No doubt this contributes to America being ranked an embarrassingly low 48th on the list of developed nations in life expectancy, and numerous other metrics of public health. Nonetheless, federally funded American medical research has consistently led the world in healthcare advances since WWII.
We are distressed that Mr. Kennedy and the White House are on the one hand promoting an ostensible prioritizing of public health, but simultaneously and hypocritically attacking critical public health programs. They are stripping tens of millions of people of their Medicaid and Obamacare coverage, causing dramatic increases in premiums, withdrawing critical nutritional support programs like SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program) from three million children, downsizing the FoodNet surveillance system that prevents food-borne illnesses, gutting smoking cessation programs, changing Medicare protocols that will reduce coverage for recipients, and eviscerating environmental, medical, and toxicological research at the EPA and NIH. Furthermore, the EPA is in the process of undermining federal protections of our air, water and food from environmental toxins, the putative primary target of Kennedy’s supposed health reformation. All of that will have the exact opposite effect from making Americans healthy again.
Perhaps the greatest long-term assault on public health from the current administration is the institutionalization of climate denial and prioritization of fossil fuels production as official federal policy. In a speech before the United Nations, ignoring both scientific facts and economic realities, the President made a startling and nonsensical attack on renewable energy and the long ago settled science of greenhouse gases, calling warnings about the impacts of climate change, “the greatest con job perpetrated by the world.”
For many years UPHE has repeated warnings of the worldwide scientific community—the fossil fuel driven climate crisis is the greatest public health threat of the 21st century, and will cause massive and irreversible harm to global public health. The lives and well-being of literally billions of the world’s population are being threatened, especially for children and future generations. Any federal policy contrary to this reality is scientifically and morally indefensible, and contradictory to any goals of Making America Healthy Again.
The MAHA commission report released by Mr. Kennedy and the Administration last May on an implied epidemic of chronic diseases with a focus on children, and their recently released supplemental report, uses cherry picked or weak science, and in many cases no science, to establish much of their agenda. They claim four causes or public ill health. 1. Poor diet, 2. Chemical exposures, 3. Lack of physical activity and chronic stress, 4. Overmedicalization.
We share with MAHA advocates a grave concern over toxic chemical exposures as important contributors to poor health, and likely poor diet, in large part because of their chemical exposures. There is much less research to support focusing on the other two. The report encourages improved early life nutrition, extols the benefit of breast feeding, organic farming, casts a critical eye towards direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals, and numerous other worthy aspirations. But it offers no concrete strategies and is extremely vague in all its recommended solutions. Conspicuous in its absence is any specific strategy for limiting pesticide use. The report rightly identifies water quality, air quality, and microplastics as important influences on public health, but offers no specific actions that should be taken.
Generally speaking we see a much smaller body of research that implicates food dyes and other chemicals associated with processing foods from industrial agriculture as possible health hazards, but we see value in reducing human exposure nonetheless. Indeed, there is important research that implicates heavily processed food with chronic adult diseases, obesity and metabolic diseases in particular. To that extent, our advocacy has some overlap with the professed goals of the MAHA movement.
The physicians of UPHE remain committed to strictly scientific evidence-based advocacy. We see the extensive and one-sided medical research on the health risks of various kinds of pollution and chemicals that have become ubiquitous in our environment; such as heavy metals, pesticides, PFAS, PAHs, PCBs, dioxins, phthalates, and many others. GMO crops deserve wide spread skepticism about their safety, not so much because of “altered genetics,” but because as currently produced, they are always paired with pervasive use of pesticides which are indisputably human toxins. The research is very clear that public health would benefit from significantly less human exposure to all these toxic compounds, and we advocate for various strategies to reduce that exposure.
In the last few decades, a vitamin/supplement/natural product industry has thrived with little research to support its efficacy and minimal federal regulation to protect consumers from unwarranted claims or unsafe products. In the last several years, this $460 billion “wellness” movement has merged with the MAHA movement, brought to a head by the COVID pandemic. New wellness influencers thrive on disputing and undermining just about every type of evidence based medical and pharmaceutical conventional wisdom, radicalizing their followers into embracing conspiracy theories and thinking that traditional medical institutions are not just flawed or inadequate, but are sinister agents intentionally making Americans sick. Kennedy has derisively called American healthcare, “sick care.” He has vowed to “free Americans” from the “aggressive suppression” of vitamin supplements by the FDA when research has shown most people with an adequate diet derive no benefit from most supplements, including vitamins. Tucker Carlson asks, “When do we get to put corrupt doctors in jail?”
Many wellness influencers, like Kennedy and others, are reaping significant incomes from selling their own unproven health concoctions. Unproven detoxification products are one of their most commonly promoted wellness schemes. Rejecting chemotherapy in favor of “natural” cures to treat cancer is also a common theme. People who use alternative medicine to cure cancer can be up to five times more likely to die within the first five years after diagnosis. We condemn this trend and warn our patients against it.
A pillar of the MAHA movement is a non-scientific and dangerous antipathy towards vaccines in general and mRNA vaccine technology in particular. Vaccinations are arguably the most important medical advance in protecting global public health in the last two centuries, having saved at least 154 million lives in just the last 50 years. The anti-vax rallying cry of MAHA is a scientific farce that exploits and victimizes millions who are susceptible to unsophisticated arguments and endangers society at large. Anti-vax ideology ignores how vaccines work, and the necessity to establish herd immunity to prevent pandemic level communicable diseases.
The President and his circle of health care advisors held a news conference on Sept. 22, where they declared acetaminophen (Tylenol) use during pregnancy and vaccines as significant causes of autism, and the President repeatedly warned pregnant women not to take Tylenol. The President has no expertise on the subject, and the supposed experts who advised him on this policy, are at best, extreme outliers in the medical community. The contention that vaccines cause autism has been thoroughly repudiated by decades of research and is a dangerous warping of public policy.
The primary study cited as demonstrating a correlation between Tylenol use during pregnancy and autism is also an outlier, contradictory to the main body of research on the subject. Every relevant, credible, medical organization in the country denounced the President’s assertion as irresponsible and unsupported by the totality of the evidence. Furthermore, other pain relievers likely represent higher fetal risk, as do leaving maternal pain and fever untreated. This issue exemplifies the axiom that the public is much better served following the medical advice of physicians, not politicians.
Regardless of the political atmosphere UPHE remains committed to advocating to protect all Utahn’s. Advocacy at times can feel polarized and or politicized yet we strive to remain unbiased in following science to pursue a healthy environment. We work to save Great Salt Lake, promote clean energy, oppose new sources of air pollution, and address the climate crisis. UPHE is proud to have led the way in protecting school children across the state with our successful air purifier program. Initiatives like these transcend political ideologies. When either political party chooses not to follow evidence-based facts, our mission becomes more challenging but not one we can afford to back down from. Rather, we will continue to educate and advocate with constituents, businesses and legislators from all sides to sustain a healthy environment today and for future generations.
In short, shining the spotlight on environmental toxins as having a serious adverse impact on public health is welcome, almost no matter who or where it comes from. But in the case of Sec. Kennedy, the current administration, and prominent figures in the wellness industry , the so called MAHA movement has so much non-scientific, illegitimate, and dangerous baggage, that we feel compelled to defend medical science and care providers from their attacks despite sharing a small portion of their agenda. We are also compelled to note the many ways that the current administration is undermining public health while claiming to foster an overall program of Making America Healthy Again.
