The Assault on Public Health and the Self-Sabotage of a Nation

MAHA channels vague grievances into a radical project. It’s a form of extremism that stands in a long tradition of paranoid conspiracism on the Far Right. We must stop it

By Thomas Zimmer, August 16, 2026

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The global superpower is in the midst of an unparalleled campaign of self-sabotage, utterly without precedent historically, via the deliberate destruction of state capacity and the elimination of professional expertise. The reckless assault on the nation’s public health infrastructure is only one example – but a particularly egregious one. It will potentially harm the lives of millions. All because the government of the United States is in the hands of shameless grifters, paranoid conspiracists, and ideological extremists.

On Monday, August 10, Donald Trump issued an executive order (Opens in a new window) calling for significant changes to childhood vaccine recommendations. It aims to reduce the number of vaccines children receive – down to vaccinations against 11 diseases (compared to 18 at the end of 2024). It also recommends the MMR vaccine (a combo vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella) be split up into three different jabs, spread out over separate doctor’s visits. And it instructs the states to revise their immunization laws and schedules accordingly. 

Trump and his secretary of health and human services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have been pushing in this direction for a while. HHS released similar recommendations in January (Opens in a new window), but those were quickly blocked by a federal court (Opens in a new window). Now they are trying again – with an executive order that is likely illegal. Yet even if it is never implemented as written, only bad things can come from this: It will further fuel vaccine skepticism, animate Republican-led states to loosen or abolish vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, and make it more complicated for everyone to receive necessary protections. As a result, fewer children will get vaccinated.

In a saner, less stupid parallel universe, there could be good reason for a thorough revision of the vaccine recommendations. The scientific consensus on some of the vaccines might have changed – or the public health situation itself might have improved to the point where certain vaccinations are no longer necessary? And could it not make sense to bring the recommendations in line with what comparable countries are doing? That is, after all, what the Trumpists have been claiming: That Denmark, which indeed recommends fewer childhood vaccinations, is their role model.

In our universe, however, none of this applies. Which is why the serious part of the scientific community strongly opposes the MAGA/MAHA assault. And while it is funny for the Trumpists to claim they want to make America a little more like Denmark, a country they usually deride as a socialist hellhole, this makes zero sense either. Denmark is more of an outlier among comparable nations with a very low number of recommended vaccinations; Germany, for instance, (Opens in a new window) currently recommends immunization against 14 diseases (including hepatitis B, rotavirus, and RSV that Trump’s EO cuts from the baseline recommendations). Most importantly, America is not Denmark, a country with universal healthcare that achieves extremely high vaccination rates anyway and also allows anyone who is sick to seek out medical care whenever needed.

In America, on the other hand, infectious diseases are soaring. The country is currently in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in decades (Opens in a new window). Even though the disease was officially eradicated in the United States in the year 2000, there were almost 2,300 cases last year, and America has already shot past that number in 2026. There are no mysteries as to why this is happening, and why now: Almost all of the people who contract measles are unvaccinated (Opens in a new window). Because the disease is so highly contagious, stopping the transmission requires an extremely high vaccination rate north of 95 percent. America has now fallen significantly below that threshold, as more and more people are refusing to let their kids be immunized with the MMR vaccine.

Vaccine skepticism – a euphemism for a pervasive tendency on the Right to choose conspiracy theories over science – has been on the rise. According to Gallup (Opens in a new window), fewer than 70 percent of Americans now believe it is “extremely or very important that parents get their children vaccinated,” down from 94 percent in 2001. The decline is concentrated almost entirely among Republicans: In 2001, a little over 60 percent of them declared it was “extremely important” for kids to be vaccinated – by 2024, that number was down to 26 percent. Meanwhile, over the same time period, the percentage of Republicans who believe vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they are supposed to prevent has gone up dramatically: From only 6 percent (and very much in line with the rest of the population) to almost one third.

This is a public health disaster. And in any remotely functioning political system, it would be treated as a national emergency. For the people who are in charge of public health in the United States and the leaders of the Republican Party, however, this is not an emergency. It is the result of what they have been preaching. 

Let us refuse to play dumb. Trump’s executive order has nothing to do with a sincere effort to improve public health, it is not the result of a serious process of evaluation. The people behind this push are not good-faith actors, but extremists driven by paranoid conspiracies.

Robert Kennedy Jr., the man Trump chose to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has no real experience or expertise in public health. What “qualified” him was the fact that he is the leader of “Make America Healthy Again,” a movement he built on the basis of decades of spreading dangerous conspiracy theories (Opens in a new window), unscientific nonsense, and anti-modern grievances. RFK isn’t even on board with our fundamental understanding of how diseases spread, occasionally indulging instead in his own version of the pre-modern miasma theory that focused on “bad air” as the cause of disease. Wi-Fi causes cancer (Opens in a new window), Kennedy has claimed – which probably endeared him to a president who believes the noise of wind turbines (Opens in a new window) does the same.

At the core of RFK’s engagement with public health has been his decades-long crusade against vaccinations. During the pandemic, he declared (Opens in a new window) the Covid vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Upon becoming HHS secretary, he immediately fired all the members (Opens in a new window) of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with people more in line with his dangerous quackery. If Kennedy Jr. has a defining belief, it is his claim (Opens in a new window) that “autism is caused by vaccines.” All the scientific evidence in the world (and in this case: the complete lack of evidence, despite a mountain of studies) will not shake him. Under his leadership, U.S. public health authorities are no longer allowed to state the undisputed scientific truth that vaccines do not cause autism; he has been working hard (Opens in a new window) to channel massive public resources into finding / manufacturing “evidence” for his conspiratorial nonsense.

Well, RFK has certainly convinced his boss. Since returning to the White House, Trump has also been obsessed with the nonexistent link between childhood vaccines and autism. Unsurprisingly, during the signing of the executive order in the oval office, Trump presented the “epidemic rates of autism” (Opens in a new window) as a key reason why he was pushing for fewer vaccinations. And in proper Trump fashion, he added some absolutely deranged nonsense (Opens in a new window) about how “they” (doctors, presumably) “have a vaccination thing that looks like the size of a bottle of soda and pour it into a little child’s body.”

In spite of this bizarre spectacle, the mainstream political discourse still regularly insists we approach MAHA as a movement defined by legitimate concerns that deserves credit for offering important critique. Last September, a writer in The Atlantic declared that RFK was basically “repeating Michelle Obama’s mistakes” (Opens in a new window): Good ideas, just going about it the wrong way… Imagine how strong the incentives to normalize and equivocate must be if they result in a piece that looks at a deranged, anti-science conspiracy theorist devastating public health and a first lady trying to get kids to move more and eat healthier and goes: These are the same, basically. “MAHA is a bad answer to a good question,” (Opens in a new window) the New York Times’ Ezra Klein titled one of his podcasts last August. And just a few weeks ago, The Atlantic wrote (Opens in a new window): “Public Health Needs MAHA: The field must swallow its pride and admit where the insurgent movement is right.” The basic move is always the same: Go through the myriad of grievances and isolate some targets that are worthy of critique; then present those decontextualized claims as MAHA’s essence. And just like that: MAHA is portrayed as defined by good questions and legitimate concerns – while the actual political project that is being advanced is reduced to a mere footnote, as if it was an unfortunate side plot. Using this approach, it would be laughably easy to “give credit” to even the evillest, most destructive political movements in history.

But this is entirely the wrong perspective on MAHA, a dramatic case of missing the forest for the trees. Let us insist on approaching MAHA as what it really is: A form of rightwing extremism that fulfills a specific role in the larger far-right ecosystem and a political project driven by paranoid conspiracism. That story – how MAHA relates to MAGA, how it channels ambiguous anxieties and ties them to a genuinely extremist rightwing cause, how to situate it in the history of the Far Right and how it captures the defining sensibilities of today’s extremists, how its rise, just like that of Trumpism more generally, is itself the manifestation of severe pathologies of American political culture – is the one we need to investigate, the one worth telling. And that is the story that should make it abundantly clear why we must fight tooth and nail against any normalization of this insidious project and the people behind it.

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What is MAHA?

Initially, „Make America Healthy Again” was a slogan RFK Jr. used for his third-party campaign for the 2024 presidential election. When Kennedy suspended his hopeless campaign at the end of August, he unsurprisingly aligned behind Donald Trump. And with that, MAHA had officially become part of MAGA.

At that point, a somewhat diffuse coalition (Opens in a new window) had united under the MAHA banner. There were people concerned about the food industry, additives, synthetic dyes and preservatives; those skeptical of the pharmaceutical industry and deeply involved in alternative medicine (Opens in a new window); a whole industry of fitness and wellness influencers; and a large reservoir of people skeptical towards anything they associated with a “modern” lifestyle (Opens in a new window), modern technology, and scientific expertise. It wasn’t until the pandemic that these heterogeneous groups gelled into a political movement under RFK’s leadership. Covid undoubtedly led to a significant radicalization (Opens in a new window) in these circles, as a militant skepticism towards the state was rapidly spreading and many in the MAHA alliance sunk deeper into the conspiratorial fever swamp of the Right.

The objectives of the movement are as diffuse as its constituency. But there are some discernible core ideas. MAHA demands a return to what they declare is a more “natural” lifestyle and diet. In January, RFK’s Department of Health and Human Services came out with some guidelines designed to “end the war on protein” (Opens in a new window): Americans, Kennedy believes, should consume more beef and drink raw milk. MAHA supporters are concerned about environmental toxins and microplastics, they demand – against all expert advice – to end water fluoridation, which they claim, based on no evidence at all, causes all sorts of illnesses. MAHA’s political identity is, ultimately, centered around the skepticism (again, a euphemism) towards vaccines (Opens in a new window). 

A far-right project

In October 2022, Fox News aired a documentary (I am using the term loosely) produced and presented by Tucker Carlson, titled “The End of Men.” (Opens in a new window) An alarmed Carlson, who at that time was Fox News’ figurehead and most successful anchor, wanted to alert his audience to an acute threat to the survival of the nation: Declining testosterone levels and increasing levels of infertility among American men. The documentary had elements that, in isolation, may have seemed reasonable and sincere. Carlson affirmatively referred to an initiative by President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s that sought to improve the population’s physical fitness. RFK Jr. came on and initially talked about the problem of microplastics and the unhealthy dietary habits of too many Americans.

But from there, the “documentary” quickly slid into conspiratorial territory: Vaccinations, Tucker and Kennedy agreed, massively contributed to weakening the male body – that is still one of MAHA’s core beliefs today. And as the paragon of proper masculinity, Carlson presented a rightwing activist who went by the pseudonym “Raw Egg Nationalist”: He is a star of the extremist online scene, his writings are being published by neo-Nazi publishers. “Raw Egg Nationalist” declared that a sinister cabal of “soy globalists” was behind a nefarious assault on America, hoping to weaken the collective body of the nation (the “Volkskörper,” the Nazis called it) to the point where “the West” was ready to fall and ripe for invasion. Only an aggressive form of nationalism, built on unquestioned white supremacy, and the ruthless purging of the nation of all the intruders and the enemies within could still save America – if it was combined with a diet consisting mostly of raw eggs.

If you want to know more about this bizarre “Raw Egg Nationalist” character and where to situate him in the broader far-right alliance, I highly recommend Laura Field’s excellent book “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right” (Opens in a new window) that came out late last year. Carlson’s documentary even plays a crucial role in one of the chapters of the book. It indicates how close the ties are between MAHA and the rightwing extremist scene.

It is certainly true that MAHA is fueled by impulses that are present across the political spectrum and even pervasive in certain leftwing-alternative corners. But it channels those tendencies towards the Right. That is precisely the key role MAHA plays in the broader far-right ecosystem: It seizes upon anxieties and tendencies that aren’t necessarily tethered to a specific political agenda initially and ties them to a political project of rightwing extremism. Conversely, MAHA captures crucial sensibilities and ideas that have defined the political identity of the radical Right in the United States for decades.

MAHA channels a sense of grievance and militant nostalgia, it is characterized by an attitude of aggressive revolt. It is fueled by the idea of a mythical past that was better somehow, or “great” perhaps, before sinister forces without and within launched their assault. This overwhelming grievance is very much also directed at what the societal mainstream generally regards as the achievements of modernity – including modern science and medicine. Reflecting on why the historical profession had struggled to grasp the rise of the conservative movement since the 1960s, historian Alan Brinkley warned in a famous essay published in 1994 (Opens in a new window) that the liberal center tended to vastly underestimate how much the social and political culture of the Right was shaped by such anti-modern impulses. The fact that someone like Robert Kennedy Jr. simultaneously seeks to align with the rightwing tech elite in Silicon Valley does not refute this observation. What we have here might best be described as a form of “reactionary modernism” – a term coined by historian Jeffrey Herf (Opens in a new window) in the 1980s as a way to capture the particular fusion of technological futurism with anti-modern resentment and reactionary politics in Nazi Germany.

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The American Right has long understood that the pervasive anti-modern impulses across U.S. society can be mobilized in service of a rightwing project and figured out ways to tap into such resentful energies. There is a fairly direct tradition, for instance, from MAHA’s raging against the fluoridation of drinkable water, one of the movement’s unifying objectives, going all the way back to the far-right anti-fluoride campaigns of the 1950s (Opens in a new window). Back then, rightwing activists hoped to benefit from the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era by propagating the idea that a Jewish-Communist conspiracy in the highest ranks of the American government was pushing fluoridation as a way to weaken the nation’s defenses.

Throughout U.S. history, the political Right has championed a vision of “freedom” understood as the privilege of certain (white, male, Christian) groups to do as they please, unburdened by the demands of society, and curtail the freedom of others. MAHA needs to be situated in this tradition also. Collective solidarity is entirely alien to the movement. Instead, it weaponizes an idea of individual “freedom” and “choice” (to opt out of vaccination requirements, for instance) that puts the burden entirely on the most vulnerable groups of society.

To the extent MAHA thinks about public health at all, their concern is directed at the state of the nation, imagined as an organic body that needs to be strengthened by purging impure elements within and safeguarding against “dirty” invaders from without. Such eugenicist ideology provides the framework for RFK Jr’s perspective on society: He seems entirely convinced that a body “steeled” by push-ups as well as a diet dominated by red meat and raw milk can withstand anything – while infectious diseases are a problem mostly for those who are a burden to the nation anyway.

The constant self-victimization is another core characteristic that MAHA shares with the radical Right more broadly. It exists in a state of imagined emergency, defined by an escalating siege mentality. MAHA is always searching for sinister forces in high places: A movement of people who constantly feel victimized by modern science, medicine, the “deep state,” and those evil “experts.” In 2021, for instance, Robert Kennedy warned (Opens in a new window) that measles outbreaks “have been fabricated to create fear” – a cunning plot engineered by government experts to bend the American people to their will. In fact, that same year, RFK wrote a whole book about the man he and the entire Trumpified Right see as the evilest, most dangerous, and most cunning of those experts: The Real Anthony Fauci was the title of this unhinged tract in which Kennedy accused Fauci of using the pandemic for a “coup d’état against democracy” in order to impose “medical totalitarianism.”

In late July, Senate Republicans held a public hearing (Opens in a new window) with Fauci as the only witness. Fauci, who has been retired for several years, was the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and, as the pandemic hit, a key member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The hearing had one purpose only: A show trial that gave Republicans the chance to throw deranged insults and bizarre conspiracy theories at the man they blame for… what, exactly? The obsession with Fauci is so weird because the Right wants to present him as Covid dictator even though Donald Trump was president in 2020. But that is precisely the point: Fixating on Fauci allows the Right to invert reality. Just like that, they have created a fiction in which they were not in power, but yet again the victims of liberal elites and authoritarian expert overreach.

This isn’t just about Fauci either. Don’t trust the experts! (Opens in a new window) That is basically RFK’s mantra. It’s a truly grotesque thing to say for the secretary of health and human services. But Kennedy knows he is merely expressing what has become dogma on the Right. Such agitation “works” because rightwing elites have spent decades undermining trust in the political institutions, in the state, the universities, the media. Since its inception in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Modern Conservatism has built its political identity as an insurgency against the supposed domination of “the Left” in all spheres of American life. The “deep state” and professional associations of experts: In this understanding, they are all compromised and can’t be trusted because of “liberal bias” – in fact, they are the power centers of the enemy within, hotbeds of leftist subversion intended to destroy the nation.

Faced with such overwhelming forces of “leftism,” the only chance “real Americans” have is to disavow all such institutions and instead fall back on traditional authorities: Conservative churches perhaps – and of course the patriarchal command of the man who leads the family. This is where Robert Kennedy’s cult of brute masculinity intersects with his crusade against medical experts. As the real “alpha” male he believes he is, he is in a constant struggle against both the supposed feminization of American society as well as the encroachments of “liberal” doctors.

This is also where MAHA’s quest to dethrone “the experts” and vanquish their seats of power in “the deep state” aligns perfectly with the more traditional deregulation agenda of the business right and the Republican donor class. At first glance, we might assume those moneyed interests saw RFK as a threat. But they understand the difference between faux-populist rhetoric and the essence of MAHA as a political project: The undermining of public trust and the destruction of state capacity. Once the public health infrastructure is devastated, two groups can thrive: The grifters selling miracle drugs who are such a big part of the rightwing ecosystem; and private capital maximizing profit for services the ravaged state no longer can provide.

MAHA is, finally, itself the manifestation rather than the cause of a dramatic rise of conspiratorialism in American politics and society. In the 1950s, the campaign under the slogan “Fluoride is Communism” was largely confined to the margins and failed to enter the mainstream. Today, the man who believes microplastics lead to “gender confusion” (Opens in a new window) and are therefore to blame for the spread of dangerous “trans ideology” is secretary of health and human services. Nothing captures the deeper pathologies of American political culture quite like the proliferation of QAnon and QAnon-adjacent beliefs across the political spectrum and especially on the Right. QAnon supporters worship Donald Trump as a messianic figure chosen to violently crush the cabal of pedophile satanists that supposedly controls society and the government. Surveys suggest that almost one fourth of U.S. adults (Opens in a new window) can be qualified as QAnon believers; among Republicans, it is almost one third.

RFK and Trump as the perfect avatars

In so many ways, Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy are both bizarre choices as political leaders. But they also perfectly embody the grievances and siege mentality that characterize their movements and fueled their rise in the first place.

Much like Trump, RFK was able to integrate the different factions of the MAHA coalition with a deranged form of charisma and by utilizing his celebrity status. As a member of the Kennedy clan and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, he was able to tap into a wide-spread nostalgia (Opens in a new window) for a “golden age” of the post-war era that never existed but nevertheless plays a mythical role in the nation’s collective imagination. His supporters view him as “authentic”: A true “alpha male” according to the Trumpist definition who, at the age of 72, constantly engages in ridiculous public displays of physical prowess and is endlessly obsessed with projecting dominance over women, political enemies, and medical experts. 

Frankly, there is nothing redeemable here. This is an ugly movement led by paranoid ideologues. In an even remotely healthy democratic system and political culture, anyone associated with the deranged extremism of people like Robert Kennedy Jr. would be shunned by mainstream society and ostracized from public life - and the party that elevates such forces would no longer be considered a viable option for anyone but the fringe.

Enough with the sanitizing, the equivocating, the normalizing. People’s lives are at stake. This is not a game.

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