In 2020, I followed a lot of Covid-skeptical momfluencers on social media. I wanted to see how they voiced their concerns about mask-wearing and disease spread. I hoped that over time I could somehow reverse-engineer the information pathway that led some women from Covid skepticism to anti-vaccine activism and then, in some cases, to other fringe and conspiratorial beliefs. I thought if I understood their information diet, I could explain their motivations better, if only to myself.
The first thing I noticed was that some of these women — who looked like the “Christian girl autumn” meme, with wide-brimmed hats and beachy waves — tended to have a back story that led them to distrust mainstream medicine and the idea of medical expertise. They often had a scary medical problem during pregnancy or immediately postpartum and they felt unheard by their obstetrician or pediatrician, or mistreated by their hospital. That experience planted a seed of fear and suspicion. Online merchants peddling “natural” remedies and those who espouse debunked theories about the danger of vaccines were more than happy to validate their raw feelings when the medical system did not.
I have covered the anti-vaccine movement for over a decade and the political valence of vaccine skepticism has changed significantly. When I first started writing, pre-Covid, about the anti-vaccine crowd I didn’t find them to be especially associated with either the Democratic or Republican Party, though if pressed I probably would have said they were liberal-leaning hippie types. By 2020, every influencer who rose to the top of my algorithm was aggressively Republican and often a vocal supporter of Donald Trump (they seemed to pay no attention to his role in Operation Warp Speed).
I was thinking of the Covid-skeptical momfluencers when I watched a brief video advertisement for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement, which Kennedy describes as a partnership “with President Donald Trump to transform our nation’s food, fitness, air, water, soil and medicine.” The video was released this month, after Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race and his ex-staffers created the MAHA Alliance Super PAC, which is trying to persuade Kennedy’s supporters to vote for Trump.
Kennedy appears to be trying to salvage the public standing he enjoyed during his failed presidential run by circling back to the vaccine skepticism that has been central to his understanding of the way the world works — namely, as my newsroom colleague Anjali Huynh put it, “a conspiracy theory.”
The first thing that viewers can do to support his movement, Kennedy says, is buy a Make America Healthy Again hat and wear it everywhere. But Kennedy goes on to explain: “Our big priority will be to clean up the public health agencies like C.D.C., N.I.H., F.D.A., and U.S. Department of Agriculture. Those agencies have become sock puppets for the industries that they’re supposed to regulate. President Trump and I are going to replace the corrupt, industry-captured officials with honest public servants.”
It struck me that the accountability that the moms I first followed seemed to be seeking was being promised by Kennedy. He says all this and more against a backdrop of attractive white families eating salad and hiking, looking very much like the social media stars on my feed. The clip ends with an adorable towheaded preschooler holding a big stick and saying, “Make America Healthy Again!”
It would be easy to dismiss the Trump-Kennedy alliance as a mercenary one — Trump can vacuum up the small but vocal number of former Kennedy voters by appealing to their shared distrust of government, and Kennedy can get some sway over Trump’s policy if he wins. The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey thinks that Trump’s coziness with business interests and desire for deregulation is in conflict with what she calls “the crunch-ificiation of conservatism,” which yearns for European-style food regulation. “The MAGA-MAHA congruence seems tactical and temporary,” Godfrey concluded in late September.
I’m not so sure it’s temporary. On Oct. 18, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Kennedy has teamed up with Trump advisers to draft potential policies and lists of personnel,” and that “Trump has committed to considering Kennedy for any job in his administration, a person familiar with the matter said, including health and human services secretary. The post oversees more than 80,000 federal employees, a budget that tops $3 trillion and a swath of federal policy.” Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the C.D.C. under Trump, expressed his full-throated support of Kennedy and MAHA’s mission in a Newsweek op-ed essay on Sept. 24, proposing a “Kennedy Commission on Childhood Chronic Disease.”
Whether or not the MAHA movement takes off, Kennedy is not alone in his views. A paper published in The Lancet in March 2023 explains this phenomenon:
Before the pandemic, anti-vaccine activism increasingly aligned with conservative political identity. Two developments were crucial to this conservative shift. One was California’s 2015 legislative effort to eliminate personal-belief exemptions for school vaccinations (bill SB-277), during which anti-vaccine activists mobilised to broaden their following beyond its traditional natural-living, left-leaning base through deliberate activation of, and outreach to, potential Tea Party and libertarian allies. The other was the formation of influential political action committees (eg, Texans for Vaccine Choice) that lobbied state legislatures and promoted conservative political candidates with anti-vaccine positions. For anti-vaccine activists, this mutualism enabled access to money, political influence, and broader audiences. For the libertarian right, it provided a cohort of politically active Americans whose support could be directed towards other causes.
The MAHA movement has framed its cause as one of parental freedom, and claim that belief in medical or governmental expertise is a rejection of the individual rights of mothers who know best. This is a very seductive message if you’ve been burned by the medical system in your or your children’s most vulnerable moments, as many of those anti-vaccine influencers said that they were.
I don’t think that pro-vaccine and pro-science people of either party are doing enough to combat this messaging. According to Gallup polling from September, “67 percent of U.S. adults say health care is not receiving enough attention during the 2024 presidential campaign.” And we’re in a moment where trust in the medical system is near a low, hovering around 35 percent.
I asked Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist and the author of the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, about how to combat the MAHA movement, considering the fact that it’s so broad, and it does bring up some legitimate concerns about Americans’ well-being. She acknowledges the challenge of communicating health information in the age of social media. “It’s just a different information landscape these days,” she said, and people “can’t rely on a trickle-down from the ivory towers anymore.”
Jetelina’s most counterintuitive idea is that somewhat complex answers can actually work. “There’s this thought that everyone just needs a simple answer or a simple communication message. ‘Get your vaccine; don’t drink raw milk.’ But we’re in an information landscape where people have access to all these different types of information. And you know what? The public can handle nuance. I have seen it over the past five years,” she said.
That nuance involves messages about what vaccines can and can’t do. She specifically praised a C.D.C. flu vaccination campaign that emphasized that the vaccine could take the illness “from wild to mild.”
It’s easy to laugh at Kennedy’s set of truly baffling beliefs — to me, the man has both literal and figurative brain worms. But mocking him and his followers won’t get them to change their minds; it may just make them double down.
“I have a lot of empathy for people out there just trying to do the right thing, especially parents that just have so much stress on them because they’re just trying to raise good human beings that are healthy, and there’s so much contradictory information out there.” Jetelina said.
It might not be possible to break through the noise of the internet on these issues. It’s certainly an uphill battle. But we need to try to take these concerns seriously, because otherwise all these parents will find is Kennedy sitting there, with a sympathetic ear.
For now, pro-vaccine views are winning, but the trust in public health remains shaky. Whether or not Trump wins or gives Kennedy a position of power in his administration, the desire to sow doubt in our medical system will outlast them both.
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