Influential figures in the Make America Healthy Again movement turned out for Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn on Wednesday evening in an effort to propel him to victory in the midterm election next week.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other key players in the MAHA movement appeared at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, organized by the MAHA Action PAC to build support for Lahn.
Kennedy, the headlining speaker for the event other than Lahn himself, praised the gubernatorial hopeful as a champion for MAHA values in the state.
“Every child in the state has a right to drink water without the fear that they’re going to get cancer, to breathe air without getting asthma, and Zach embodies this,” Kennedy said.
Lahn has consistently trailed his Democratic opponent, Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand, in polling since mid-September. As of Wednesday, Sand is ahead by 6.2 percentage points, according to an average of October polls from RealClearPolitics.
Lahn was one of the few GOP candidates to win his primary without an endorsement from President Donald Trump, but he received support from the MAHA Action PAC during the primary that tipped him over the edge.
Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action, said Lahn’s low poll numbers now are similar to his unexpected victory in the primary.
“I think he was losing then, and he’s losing now, but he’s going to win in the end because the people of Iowa are going to come out because they know the real thing when they see it,” Lyons said.
Others at the MAHA rally to support Lahn included Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo, Iowa Republican Attorney General Brenna Bird, and Iowa Republican House candidate Joe Mitchell, among others.
All of the speakers at the rally said the government needed to end corrupt influences on industry in the state that have contributed to environmental pollution through agriculture.
“For a long time, a select few have gotten very rich off the backs of the health of our children,” Lahn said. “And when I am governor, I am telling you this right now: in the state of Iowa, that is over.”
Cancer and agriculture in Iowa
The MAHA message has resonated with Iowans in part because the state has been grappling with competing interests between the agriculture industry at the heart of the state’s economy and the growing problem with poor health and cancer in the state.
The University of Iowa estimated earlier this year that there will be nearly 22,000 new cancer diagnoses and 6,400 cancer deaths within the year in the Hawkeye State. Nearly 6% of Iowa’s population consists of either cancer survivors or people currently battling some form of the disease.
Lahn and others within the MAHA movement have blamed the cancer rate in Iowa on excessively high nitrate levels in the water supply, as well as exposure to pesticides.
“I’ll be very clear. My No. 1 priority as your governor is to clean up our water and to stop the cancer crisis in the state of Iowa,” Lahn said.
Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, commended Lahn at the rally for his willingness to speak openly about the connection between the state’s high cancer rates and chemical pollutants from the agriculture industry.
“We need healthy, masculine men to fight these toxins in our communities, and Zach Lahn is one of the only people that has the courage to speak up about the state of agrochemicals in this country,” Honeycutt said.
In previous speeches, Lahn has connected his father’s diagnosis with non-Hodgkin lymphoma to exposure to glyphosate, the main chemical in the pesticide and crop desiccant Roundup made by Bayer.
Calley Means, who quit his position as a White House health policy adviser last week following clashing priorities with other senior advisers, said at the rally that Lahn is capable of balancing agriculture business interests with the health of the population.
“Of course, we need stable input prices for our farming, but we also care about the health of our children, the health of our food, and we can grapple with that,” Means said. “The people of Iowa can grapple with complex challenges, and Zach has the maturity to bring those questions.”
MAHA as a “pro-life” issue
Lahn during the event labeled several priorities of the MAHA movement as “pro-life” issues, including curbing pollution, removing COVID-19 vaccines from the market, and improving food quality in school lunches.
Lahn characterized MAHA as “a fight to make sure people can live long, healthy lives” that mirrors the policy fight against abortion.
“The fight to protect the unborn is all about protecting human potential,” Lahn said. “An unborn child could be anything, do anything, solve anything, love anyone. But on the other end of this, when we’re protecting the lives and make sure people can live long, healthy lives, we’re protecting human wisdom. That’s what we’re protecting.”
Kennedy, who appeared at the MAHA Action event in his personal capacity rather than in his position in the Trump administration, dedicated much of his 30-minute speech to connecting the MAHA movement to spirituality and the human relationship to God through nature.
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“When we destroy creation, we destroy part of our capacity to sense the divine, to understand who God is and what our own potential is as human beings,” Kennedy said, adding that it is a “sin for us to do that to our children.”
Kennedy praised Lahn as “somebody who is really smart, who understands these issues, who is rooted in those soils, who has credibility with everybody in the political landscapes.”