One of the few things that can (sometimes) console me about the current hellscape that federal public health, medical, and biomedical research policy have become under the stewardship of longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Donald Trump is schadenfreude. I experience schadenfreude every time I see a story in which arch conspiracy theorists like RFK Jr. who have come into power over vaccine and health policy far beyond their wildest dreams find themselves the victims of the very same tactics and rhetoric they’ve long weaponized against conventional medicine, physicians, and scientists. So it was with great amusement that, while perusing the usual antivax sites, I came across an article in NaturalNews.com entitled Former MAHA director warns that COVID-19 vaccine issues are intentionally hidden, as RFK Jr. is maneuvered into compliance. True, the name on the byline was not Mike Adams himself, but rather one of his disposable writing drones, Lance Johnson, who by this point might just be AI slop, but that Adams would publish something like this is telling to me, particularly about where RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement is right now.
At this point, let me just interject that I still believe that RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines. What he’s done at the CDC and FDA, as well as key committees overseeing vaccine policy, and his push to relitigate scientific issues of vaccine safety and autism causation that have been well studied continue to convince me that he definitely wants to eliminate all vaccines. The schadenfreude that I’m experiencing is from the now undeniable observation that the MAHA movement is getting very restless because they think RFK Jr. is not doing nearly enough or moving fast enough to eliminate vaccines, as you will see.
MAHA attacks, and reality bends!
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written much about anything Mike Adams has published, largely because, now that RFK Jr. is in charge of HHS, his rantings seem almost quaint and pre-pandemic by comparison. However, I do think it’s worth starting out with the NaturalNews take on what’s happening before exploring in a (slightly) less snarky manner just what the heck is likely to be going on and what it means for federal policy with respect to science-based medicine and public health. The hilarious thing is that the very conspiracy theories fueled by MAHA are now coming back to bite RFK Jr. Just look at the introduction to the post:
The corridors of power at the Department of Health and Human Services are echoing with a tense and unsettling silence, a forced quiet around the most pressing medical scandal of our time: COVID-19 vaccine failure and vaccine injuries. While new leadership under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised a revolution against the pharmaceutical machine, a disturbing pattern of internal censorship and managed narratives is emerging.
Whistleblowers from within are now revealing that the tough questions about COVID-19 vaccine injuries, the relentless spread of the toxic spike protein, and the ongoing harm to children are being deliberately suppressed. Instead of confronting this public health catastrophe, the agency is being steered toward trivialities like food dyes and contraceptive labels – a deliberate distraction from the genetic weaponry that was unleashed upon the world and its implications for medical malpractice. Is RFK Jr. being maneuvered into silence? How deep does the rot go, and who is truly in charge of an agency meant to protect the people?
One thing that really struck me about this particular antivax narrative is how much it’s a Bizarro World version of what is actually happening at HHS, reminding me how every accusation from these conspiracy theorists is a confession. In reality, RFK Jr. has purged the key advisory committee on vaccines at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), of scientific expertise, firing all its members and replacing them with nearly all antivaxxers, thus turning ACIP into a clown car of incompetence and antivax nonsense; installed “COVID contrarians” like FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary (who himself is starting to find himself at the receiving end of such conspiracy theories, even as the vultures swirl to reduce his role at the Food and Drug Administration to that of a figurehead due to his incompetent hands-off and confrontational management style) and Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as NIH Director, whose inexperience and utter lack of qualifications to run such a large and important institution become more apparent by the day, leading to the Lysenko-ization of the NIH; hired long disgraced antivax “researcher” David Geier, as well as longtime antivax activist Mark Blaxill to “research” vaccine safety; and fired new CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez because, as she stated, she would not just sign off on his vaccine edicts, leading to a mass resignation of key CDC leadership. It is not the MAHA-aligned staff at NIH, FDA, CDC, and all the other agencies at HHS who are being intimidated and living in fear of their jobs, thanks to RFK Jr. and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought. It’s the career staff who try to apply rigorous scientific, medical, and clinical standards to their jobs, research, and policy making for which they are responsible.
But, no, according to the conspiracy theory, it’s really RFK Jr. who has been “compromised” and his MAHA stans who are supposedly living in fear of “speaking the truth” about vaccines, in particular COVID-19 vaccines, with Adams’s writer drone claiming that Former MAHA director Gray Delany was fired after “alleging a culture of fear at HHS that prevents officials from discussing COVID-19 vaccine harms”; Makary “justified keeping the vaccine emergency use authorization in place specifically for immunocompromised children”; and, hilariously, that RFK Jr. is “being ‘sequestered’ and ‘managed’ by his own staff, preventing him from receiving crucial information and acting on his stated convictions.” Why? Because “they” are putting “immense pressure” on RFK Jr. to “maintain the status quo on mRNA technology” because it’s so important Moderna, Pfizer, and all the companies developing the technology for more than just vaccines, but for vaccines and treatments for cancer. (That must be why, right out of the gate, the administration ordered the NIH to cancel $500 million in mRNA research grants.)
Of course, one can’t help but see echoes of excuse making for leaders with a cult of personality around them (like RFK Jr.) that paints their perceived failure not as a personal failing but rather as due to underlings keeping them from knowing the truth about the problems proliferating under their watch and that, if the leader knew, he would put things to right. Adams’ minion even says so:
This paints a picture of a leader who knows he is being manipulated, but feels powerless to break free. Delany suggested Kennedy is “humiliated” by the situation and had “no choice” but to comply with the handlers around him. The mission, therefore, becomes not one of policy, but of liberation: “We need to somehow figure out how to break Secretary Kennedy free from this chokehold.”
If only RFK Jr. knew…
If only his underlings and the “deep state” weren’t keeping RFK Jr. in the dark…
If only RFK Jr. could “break free”…
Seriously, how does RFK Jr. go, in the minds of antivax conspiracy theorists, from being so dynamic, powerful, and ready to shake up the status quo to being so easily manipulated by those around him, by people like Principal Deputy Chief of Staff/Senior Counselor to the Secretary Stephanie Spear and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles? To me, the hilarious thing about these charges coming from Delany is that he was the former Director of MAHA Implementation—yes, that was his real title!—at HHS. Even more hilarious is that he appears to have been the fall guy for the incompetent rollout of the announcement regarding the cancellation of mRNA vaccine technology grants, which had been announced “out of the blue,” catching the White House flat-footed, leading to embarrassing questions from reporters about how eliminating support for grants to develop mRNA technology squared with President Trump’s pride in “Operation Warp Speed” during his first term. There was speculation that the decision might be reversed, and Delany, MAHA and antivax to the core, did his best to prevent that and ended up getting fired:
But Hatfill and Delany’s defiance had consequences. The night after Hatfill’s Bannon interview, in a move that stunned the MAHA faithful, Delany was fired after 52 days on the job. Spear had “lost confidence” in him.
“They covered up their own incompetence by firing the one guy that tried to pull something together,” Bannon told me on a call hours after Delany was sacked. “This has been a debacle.”
Delany and Hatfill declined a request for comment. HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in an email that Delany “is leaving HHS to contribute to the MAHA-MAGA movement from outside the official sector.”
I guess he probably wanted to spend more time with his family, too. In any event, you can see why this narrative is painting Spear as the bogey man (or woman), because:
According to reporting by Brandy Zadrozny, RFK Jr’s Chief of Staff told Delany not to go on MAGA shows and discuss the mRNA cancellation. They ignored her and went on Steve Bannon’s show, going against what RFK Jr. had originally claimed and calling mRNA vaccines dangerous, citing a 181-page “evidence” list later tied to the 2024 book Toxic Shot, which experts widely discredited. And then Delaney was fired.
Here’s another hilarious thing. Delany is actually not far from correct when he accuses RFK Jr. of this:
In a recent and explosive interview, Gray Delany, the now-ousted director of MAHA implementation, pulled back the curtain on the stifling atmosphere within HHS. He described a workforce “scared of their own shadow,” operating under a “self-fulfilling prophecy that you’re just not to bring up the vaccine issue.” The strategy, he revealed, is to focus on “easy wins first,” like food dyes and hormone replacement, while indefinitely sidelining the urgent need to address the documented dangers of the COVID-19 shots. This calculated diversion away from mRNA vaccine failures and the widespread societal harms of this genetic weaponry raises a critical question: who benefits from this silence?
Ah, “Cui bono?” indeed. Again, I call BS on the “workforce scared of their own shadow,” not because the HHS workforce isn’t very frightened and intimidated, but because the reason that they feel this way is not, contrary to the antivax narrative, because they are afraid of speaking out against mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines thanks to a shadowy cabal of advisors keeping RFK Jr. from knowing “The Truth” and ruthlessly suppressing “dissent.” It’s because RFK Jr. and his sycophants, toadies, and lackeys are promoting an environment that makes them afraid of defending science and speaking out against pseudoscience and bad science, while Russell Vought is doing his best to fire as many of them as he can.
Of course, the charge of “going for the easy wins” as a distraction is not far from the truth. I’ll discuss this more in the final section of this post. I also find it amusing how outraged MAHA activists like Delany and fellow fired MAHA official mentioned above, Steve Hatfill, have become, indeed, to the point of doing interviews attacking Spears and Wiles:
Leading, predictably, to speculations like:
Who, then would be Wiles’ “handler”? Amusingly, Dr. Paul “We Want Them Infected” Alexander has taken to referring to Susie Wiles as “the Outlaw Josie Susie Wales” and claiming that she “represents PHARMA’s interests, not that of American people’s health and well-being.” Meanwhile, MAHA bloggers and Substackers like Julian Gillespie the “2nd Smartest Guy in the World” are writing articles about this with titles like MAHA has fallen and MAJOR MAHA FAIL: RFK Jr. Defends White House Chief of Staff & BigPharma Lobbyist with Ties to the PSYOP-19 “Vaccine”, respectively. That second post was in response to RFK Jr. taking to X, the hellsite formerly known as Twitter, to defend Susie Wiles and Stephanie Spear:
promise of a powerful health-related position in the administration,
should Trump win, in 2024. Now he’s referring to his supporters as
“chaos agents.”
Predictably, a lot of MAHA stans were having none of it:
And
And:
working for President Trump, who is behind this perceived
“betrayal.”
Then I saw that Mike Adams himself had commented:
I laughed out loud at that last response. When you’ve lost Mike Adams, you’re hurting. Adams’ comment makes this as good a spot as any to pivot from X to what MAHA activists on Substack are saying, for instance the self-proclaimed “2nd Smartest Guy in the World“:
Susie Wiles is a RINO working on behalf of her NWO globopedo handlers against We the People; she is the antithesis of all things MAHA and MAGA, and yet RFK Jr. was forced to publicly defend her.
Poor Bobby. Again, when you’ve lost the “2nd Smartest Guy in the World”…
away at the base of the statue are Susie Wiles and Stephanie Spears. Also amusing
to me is that RFK Jr. appears to be portrayed wearing an ancient Roman toga.
Then there’s Gillespie, who brags about interrupting his break from writing to compose MAHA has fallen, whichreads like a bad stream-of-consciousness rant and is barely comprehensible, but I think you’ll get the idea from this excerpt:
since the start of the year soon after we filed our Citizen Petition evidencing grossly excessive DNA contamination, and the FDA’s illegal role in not calling the Covid vaxxines Gene Therapies, we have been suspicious of those working alongside Bobby Kennedy Jnr .. particularly Bobby’s Principal Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephanie Spear
Stephanie is a shadowy figure
.. Stephanie who, it turns out, controls ALL of Bobby’s messaging
.. messaging which to date has been disastrous and ineffective
like Bobby’s messaging on the Covid vaxxines
being effectively, nothing
.. despite the global evidence he knows about
and which has been presented to him
like our Citizen Petition
adding to the squeeze and gagging of Bobby are the efforts of Susie Wiles, Trump’s Chief of Staff, who has been working overtime to preserve the illusion of Operation Warp Speed having been a great achievment, of The Donald
when we all know OWS ushered in the genetic poisoning of a global population
.. with manifold vaxxine induced injuries and diseases
too many to name here
alongside millions of deaths
.. well, we all know these things, unfortunately
but what everybody now needs to know and hear about from those who were – until recently – within the inner circle of the MAHA administration, who were meant to be working to help Bobby achieve everything he said he would, is how Bobby has been gagged, compromised, and rendered ineffective .. castrated
Bobby has been shut up
.. and MAHA does appear to have been taken over
by
Big Pharma
.. thus why the legal evidence we presented in our Citizen Petition is not receiving the attention is should have, as soon as Bobby was sworn in as Secretary of HHS
in circumstances where we received confirmation Bobby read the thing personally
and some of his advisors thanked us for getting the thing properly filed
so Bobby could use it as a legal basis for suspending the products
.. but .. to date .. nothing
Seriously, man. Get an editor. Also, you are not E.E. Cummings. Your lack of capitalization and your rambling writing style are not artsy, clever, or even stylistically interesting. They just come across as unhinged.
You get the idea, though. RFK Jr.’s antivax followers are very unhappy, based on their perception of how little has been done thus far to get rid of mRNA-based vaccines, and they are expressing that unhappiness.
RFK Jr. and his high wire act
That RFK Jr. felt obliged to respond publicly to defend Spear and Wiles against the attacks coming from the hard antivax wing of MAHA over his handling thus far of mRNA vaccines tells me that the discontent in the ranks of MAHA is starting to become a problem for him. Indeed, some mainstream media outlets are starting to notice, although I’m surprised at how few. One mainstream outlet that’s published an article on the discontent in the MAHA ranks over Spear and Wiles’ supposed influence over RFK Jr. is POLITICO, which last week published an article RFK Jr. calls for unity after supporters attack Trump aides, The story doesn’t add much to what I’ve been describing, as it’s basically just a superficial recounting the kerfuffle starting with RFK Jr.’s defense of Spear and Wiles and the reactions to that defense without going into any depth. There’s also an article in the right wing newspaper The Washington Examiner entitled RFK Jr. defends Susie Wiles from attacks by MAHA base. Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall
Interestingly, the crank outlet TrialSiteNews (TSN) appears to describe what is really going on here, defending RFK Jr. in an article entitled MAHA in the Crossfire: RFK Jr., Trump Aides, and the Battle for Narrative Control. After noting that TSN has “challenged hit pieces on Ms. Spear, finding them distractions from the true levers of power in the national health system” and “a coalition built on challenging entrenched health orthodoxy is now grappling with mistrust, factionalism, and ideological purity tests,” TSN observes:
A dismissed HHS advisor as TSN reported, Dr. Steven Hatfill, emerges as a central figure. In an interview amplified by MAHA activists, Hatfill accused Wiles and others of siding with “Big Pharma” to derail Kennedy’s agenda. This claim is speculative; the only verifiable fact is Wiles’ past association with Mercury, a lobbying firm whose client list includes Pfizer. Whether that constitutes an ideological conflict is interpretation, not evidence.
HHS officials counter that Hatfill was terminated for overstating his authority. Hatfill says he was punished for pushing MAHA reforms. This is a classic bureaucratic clash—neither narrative is fully substantiated.
This is likely what is going on, at least with Hatfield. He was fired recently, and now he’s trying to get back at the person whom he views as having been behind his firing. Hatfield has a rather interesting history, as he was long under suspicion as the person responsible for the anthrax scare after 9/11. Last month, I listened to a two-part episode on the Behind the Bastards podcast about Hatfield, a former US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) researcher, who was accused of sending envelopes containing anthrax spores to a number of people in the wake of 9/11. Unfortunately for him, the FBI investigated him for years even though there was little evidence and it was becoming increasingly clear that he was the wrong man. True, Hatfield was exonerated after nearly seven years, but his life was almost ruined. It’s just interesting backstory, but it could partially explain why Hatfield is so hostile to government science agencies. As for Delany, as I have mentioned above, his firing seems to be due to his having gone against instructions regarding how the Trump administration and RFK Jr. wanted the messaging about the canceled mRNA contracts to be done.
TSN concludes:
MAHA’s internal cohesion is under pressure, and Kennedy is trying to keep a fractious coalition intact. Politico’s framing leans toward portraying MAHA as chaotic—a mainstream media tendency when covering outsider movements. At the same time, a subset of MAHA enthusiasts amplify rumor, guilt-by-association logic, and intra-movement suspicion.
Well, yes and no. It’s more than just a subset of “MAHA enthusiasts” who are unhappy. The reason, of course, is because MAHA was born out of the antivaccine movement. I noted the internal tension in MAHA from the very beginning. For example, when RFK Jr. first published his “MAHA manifesto” before the 2024 election, I noted one huge and glaring omission: Vaccines, which were not mentioned even once in his WSJ MAHA declaration. Here was a man who had spent the last 20 years as the nation’s most famous antivax activist writing a manifesto about how to “make America healthy again,” but there was no mention of vaccines in it—not a single one. Right then and there, I knew what RFK Jr. was up to. He was going to do exactly what critics cited above accused him of. He was going to downplay his antivax conspiracy mongering in order to focus on things that he could potentially sell, such as improving diet and exercise and working on environmental toxins as a means of decreasing the prevalence of chronic diseases, which became the total emphasis.
No one was fooled, least of all I. Even before the 2024 election, I wrote about how antivaxxers could easily see through the misdirection of MAHA. Some were willing to go along with it as a pragmatic matter, trusting RFK Jr. to do what they hoped. Others most definitely were not. One of those who was most definitely not happy was actually Dr. Alexander, who wrote on his Substack, MAHA (MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN) is misdirection; McCullough is 100% correct! I am calling on Bobby Kennedy Jr. to FOCUS on failed OWS & Malone Bourla etc. mRNA vaccine! MAHA is distraction, Sasha is CORRECT, see her last piece I promoted, this MAHA sidelines the deadliness of OWS & Malone Bourla Bancel et al. mRNA vaccine, come on Bobby Jr., I know Malone is cupping balls for a job but. (Yes, I do intentionally include the full headline and subtitle just to show you a bit of Alexander’s “style,” such as it is. Classy guy, right?) In his Substack Alexander cited—surprise! surprise!—Shannon Joy, referring to an interview between her and Dr. Peter McCullough, antivaxxer and spokesperson for a COVID-19 antivax grift The Wellness Company, with the title Exclusive With Dr. Peter McCullough: ‘The MAHA Movement’s Focus On FOOD Is A Dangerous Distraction’ From The REAL Cause Of Death & Disease, COVID Shots & CDC Recommended Vaccines!
I’m just going to quote Joy and McCullough again, first Joy:
On day one, Dr. McCullough, when RFK Jr. made his speech suspending his campaign, I came on my show and I said, there are some very glaring omissions here in this speech. And most importantly, COVID-19 lockdowns, the kill protocols, Operation Warp Speed, the COVID-19 vaccines and the childhood vaccine schedule, the mandated. And none of that is all food and pharma, food and pharma.
Well, fast forward to MAHA and it seems as if it’s just getting worse and worse and worse. We’re seeing a complete omission of discussion on that, at least from my perspective. And then there’s this whole new crap of characters.
McCullough, unsurprisingly, agreed with Joy:
We’re being poisoned. Somebody is poisoning us. So we look around us and we see people sick with myocarditis, or neuropathy, or blood clots.
Maybe we would think, no, it’s not the vaccine. We’re being poisoned with something. When I first heard this, I said, oh my Lord, this is the biggest deflection, misdirection campaign I’ve ever heard of.
And I was shocked it was coming from Robert F. Kennedy. And whether it’s intentional or whether it’s just a byproduct of this new concern, it’s taking eyes off of this COVID-19 vaccine debacle and then kind of deeper concerns about the accelerating COVID-19 vaccines being added to the routine child’s schedule and the accelerating childhood schedule.
This tension between antivaxxers who want all vaccines, particularly COVID-19 vaccines, gone now and the more pragmatic elements of MAHA, who want to sell the public on dubious diet and exercise interventions for chronic disease as a gateway to becoming antivaccine, has been there at the very formation of MAHA as movement. This tension continued. In January, less than a week before Donald Trump was going to be inaugurated as President, antivaxxers were publishing Substacks wondering if RFK Jr. would “betray us” and bemoaning reports about RFK Jr.’s longtime collaborator, attorney Aaron Siri, being removed from the Trump transition team. Another antivaxxer named Sasha Latypova expressed her unhappiness thusly:
Ok, I am just the messenger here… You can see the shitshow for yourself. The cabal is pushing the “healthy food and exercise” and “vaccines are a political loser” message. Which is what Trump himself voiced on several occasions.
In January, though, it was not Stephanie Spear and Susie Wiles who were the bad guys not letting RFK Jr. be RFK Jr. and not letting him fly his full antivax freak flag high. Rather, it was Casey and Calley Means. Actually, Trump was not wrong about that. Despite all the inroads made by antivaxxers since the pandemic, being antivax is still a political loser, at least for now. Even RFK Jr. seems to recognize this, which is likely why he’s treading slowly. The problem is, of course, that he’s been in charge of HHS for nine months now. His antivax followers are becoming more and more impatient. Indeed, one manifestation of this impatience was on display earlier this month in the form of a conference held in Texas and organized by the antivax organization founded by RFK Jr., Children’s Health Defense. There, RFK Jr.’s allies did let their antivax freak flag fly high, starting with a man familiar to regular readers of SBM:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to say that he is not anti-vaccine, he is “pro-safety.” But when 1,000 of his supporters gathered in Austin, Texas, last weekend for a celebratory conference to chart the future of their movement, they embraced a term — “anti-vax” — some once regarded as a slur.
“God is an anti-vaxxer, and he needs you to speak up,” declared Del Bigtree, a close ally of Mr. Kennedy who served as his communications director during his presidential campaign. Mr. Bigtree spoke during a session that looked back on his 2016 documentary asserting that there was a cover-up of a link between vaccines and autism.
That 2016 film was a propaganda pseudodocumentary disguised as a documentary, VAXXED, which rehashed the 2014 CDC whistleblower conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that the CDC had “covered up” results of a 2004 study supposedly showing an increased risk of autism in African-American boys vaccinated with the MMR. Del Bigtree produced the film, with which the godfather of the 21st century iteration of the antivax movement, Andrew Wakefield, made his directing review. (Wakefield was at the conference.)
As has happened over the last decade or so, what was once fringe is mainstream, and now, with RFK Jr. in charge of HHS, his old org is no longer antivax enough, at least not according to the man who leads the MAHA Institute:
“I’ve come to this anti-vax conference with a message that we need to be more boldly anti-vax,” said Mark Gorton, the president of the MAHA Institute, a group that works to advance Mr. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Mr. Gorton assailed the website of Mr. Kennedy’s former nonprofit as “some pretty weak anti-vaxxery.”
Children’s Health Defense, “some pretty weak antivaxxery”? I laughed out loud reading that. CHD is and has been about as antivax as it gets. I found it very telling that someone like Gorton would have the cojones say something like this about CHD at a MAHA conference, that was organized by CHD. It suggests to me that CHD is the past and that more radical antivax groups are the present and the future, which is profoundly depressing to think about. Indeed, just this morning, The Atlantic published an article by Tom Barker entitled RFK Jr.’s Cheer Squad Is Getting Restless, which is basically true. However, I was puzzled that there was no mention of Bigtree’s boast about God being an antivaxxer or of Gorton criticizing CHD for being “some pretty weak anti-vaxxery,” although the reporter did mention that during an interview with Russell Brand, Brand called him a Nazi.
Moving on, though, some antivaxxers do understand the strategy:
Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, which has targeted ultraprocessed food and chemicals along with vaccine safety, is both bold and strategic because it offers something to both progressives and conservatives, said Bigtree.
“It’s very intelligent to start with food and moving chemical petroleum dyes out of our food supply, getting lead and arsenic out of baby food, saying that you care about doing studies for safety,” Bigtree told POLITICO at the event. “All of those things, I think, are making people realize on the liberal side, ‘This isn’t the person that I expected. Oh, he’s not eradicating the vaccine program. He just wants safety testing.’”
Moving public opinion is key, he and others said, and in that sense sowing doubt among Americans about the safety of vaccines is an accomplishment on its own.
That is, of course, what RFK Jr.’s game is really about: Use fear mongering about food dyes, advocacy of diet as the cure-all for chronic disease, and pushing more “natural” medicine as a gateway to antivax views. He knows as well as anyone else that alternative medicine is often a gateway to becoming antivaccine, because doubt about anything portrayed as “unnatural” (as vaccines often are) can lead to doubts about vaccines. There’s a good reason why the vast majority of naturopaths and chiropractors are antivax. Indeed, the emboldening of people like Del Bigtree, who after years of claiming to be “not antivaccine” but “pro-safety are now willing to openly proclaim that they are antivaccine to the point of saying that “God is an antivaxxer,” tells me that the strategy is working. Ten years ago—or even a couple of years ago—you almost never saw antivaxxers admitting, much less proclaiming proudly, that they are antivaccine. Now you do.
So, has MAHA fallen? Sadly, it clearly has not—at least not yet—but RFK Jr. is walking quite the dangerous tightrope. If he is too radically antivax and moves too fast to eliminate vaccines, he risks a backlash that might make him toxic enough to President Trump to do something about him. Indeed, we saw some of that a few months ago, when confusing and vague recommendations with respect to who should receive COVID-19 boosters led to widespread discontent among people who wanted the boosters but either had a hard time finding them or could not get their insurance to pay for them. On the other hand, if RFK Jr. is not antivax enough, doesn’t move fast enough, and doesn’t get rid of the vaccines most hated by antivaxxers (mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines) soon, he risks alienating his base, something that I perceive to be already happening. The attacks on Spear and Wiles and outright antivax declarations like that of Del Bigtree represent manifestations of that incipient alienation, as well as pressure from his base to move faster to address their demands to get rid of vaccines.
I wish I could say that I know which way things will go, whether RFK Jr. will manage his high wire act or fall to his (political) doom, but I don’t. One thing that I do know is that the vast majority of his followers will stick with him in the short term because of his two decade history of fighting for what they believe in, the elimination of all, or nearly all, vaccines.
