While many are too quick to dismiss the entire “Make America Healthy Again” movement as a compilation of Instagram health advice and fast-talking pseudoscience, it’s undeniable that parts of MAHA are crucially important to the health of our society. Concerns over ever-expanding vaccine schedules, government subsidies driving the use of high fructose corn syrup, and the inclusion of carcinogenic food colors in children’s cereal are among the many subjects on which MAHA has gained significant, and well-deserved, momentum in recent years.
But while MAHA might have celebrated the selection of its somewhat overnight spokesman, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., perhaps its members need to worry whether he is endangering the same movement he hijacked on his path to power.
During a joint press conference between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration to announce plans to ban petroleum-based food dyes, Kennedy went into yet another one of his carefully worded and potentially damaging rants, describing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, speech delays, tics, Tourette’s syndrome, narcolepsy, and autism as “injuries” he’d “never heard of when [he] was a kid.”
“They were not part of the nomenclature,” the HHS secretary added. “They weren’t part of the dialogue,” he said before discussing the amount spent on chronic disease today compared to when his uncle, John F. Kennedy, was president.
First, phrasing these various disorders, syndromes, and medical issues as “injuries” is intentional, subtly assuming Kennedy’s favorite premise: that these are a result of behavior or environment and are therefore preventable.
Second, despite his latest claims, these conditions existed long before Kennedy was a child, as if that’s even a meaningful moment in time after which everything apparently went oh-so-wrong.
The symptoms of ADHD were first described by a Scottish physician in 1798. Was McDonald’s to blame? The first recorded case of Tourette’s syndrome was described by a French doctor in 1825. Was the MMR vaccine the culprit? The first official case reports of narcolepsy were given in the late 19th century by German and French doctors. Too much Red No. 40?
This isn’t to say that modern factors don’t contribute to some of these issues. But what it does indicate is that Kennedy’s memory-fueled image of what was common and uncommon when he was a child, even if he were the most medically aware child in the history of children, is both inaccurate and irrelevant.
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The problem with Kennedy here is that he takes something that could be interpreted as an objective, data-backed problem, such as the rise of autism among children, and then proceeds to ignore every reasonable explanation, or even partial explanation, to reach the conclusion he was looking for all along. After all, only Kennedy could be looking into whether vaccines cause autism when the science on this specific case is settled.
MAHA is an important movement, and those who care about making America healthy need to be careful not to tie themselves so tightly to a man who never cared about actual science, presumably because it was yet another word he never heard of as a child.
Ian is a syndicated columnist. Follow him on X (@ighaworth) or Substack.