From smartwatches and rings to cardiac rhythm sensors and continuous glucose monitors, wearable health technology is significantly contributing to the MAHA focus on America’s chronic disease crisis by striving to prevent adverse health conditions — and warn us before it’s too late.

Wearables, as they are known, provide users with continuous, real-time, patient-generated insight into their own physiology, Scott Whitaker told The MAHA Report.

Whitaker is president and CEO of AdvaMed, the world’s largest trade association representing 650 members, from multinational companies to small businesses and start-ups. Before his current role, Whitaker served as chief operating officer of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) and chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“The vast majority of experts and observers agree that, for too long, America’s health care system has focused more on treating disease than preventing it,” Whitaker said. “Chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and metabolic disorders continue to shorten lives and drive up cost — often because problems are detected too late or patients lack access to interventional medtech that could help prevent advanced illness and enhance our ability to live long, healthy lives.”

He added, “But a meaningful shift is under way, and it’s happening on wrists, fingers, shoulders, and even just beneath the skin — and medtech is leading the way.”

Wearables are one key to the MAHA health agenda, helping Americans transform their lives and “make good judgments about their diet, about their physical activity, about the way that they live their lives,” as HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has put it.

During a House Subcommittee on Health meeting last July, Kennedy told the panel that wearable technology is “a way people can take control over their own health.”

“They can see what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates and a number of other metrics as they eat it, and they can begin to make good judgments about their diet, about their physical activity, about the way that they live their lives,” Kennedy said.

Poor nutrition and a lack of exercise are among the factors that contribute to disease and obesity. The first wearables were step counters and heart-rate trackers. Modern smartwatches and rings track heart rhythm, physical activity, sleep, and, in some cases, blood oxygen levels.

FDA-cleared wearable medical devices continuously record glucose levels or detect irregular heart rhythms such as atrial fibrillation, Whitaker noted.

“Wearable activity trackers are consistently associated with increases in physical activity and reductions in sedentary behavior — key contributors to long-term health,” he said.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a heart rhythm disorder where the upper heart chambers beat chaotically, leading to a fast and irregular heartbeat, according to the Mayo Clinic.

AF, one of the most dangerous contributors to heart disease, is often undetected until a stroke or another serious complication occurs.

“Wearables are increasingly helping to close that detection gap,” Whitaker said.

“Smartwatches using optical sensors and single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) technology have demonstrated strong accuracy in identifying atrial fibrillation in real-world settings,” he explained.

The FDA has cleared multiple smartwatch ECG features and continues to evaluate their real-world performance. The agency has noted that earlier identification of abnormal rhythms can prompt timely medical evaluation and treatment. These factors are associated with reduced risk of stroke and heart failure in appropriate patients.

For people with diabetes, continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) represents one of the most powerful disease-management and early-intervention tools.

CGMs significantly improve glycemic control and help users maintain blood sugar within recommended ranges, reducing the risk of long-term complications, according to the CDC and the NIH.

In a recent study of more than 9,000 adults with Type 2 diabetes, consistent CGM use was associated with substantially greater reductions in A1C when compared with no monitoring.

AdvaMed member companies make wearables for a variety of additional purposes, such as a monitor of pulmonary volumes, cardiometabolic assessment, monitoring epileptic seizures, and treating essential tremor, among other uses.

Sleep is a key pillar of long-term health that is often under-prioritized. AdvaMed member, Resmed – a health technology company focused on sleep, breathing, and care delivered in the home – recently announced a partnership with Oura.

Oura makes the Oura Ring, which continuously monitors nighttime breathing patterns. When the device detects a higher number of breathing disturbances, it notifies members in the app and suggests when to seek advice from a healthcare provider.

Users who receive the notification can now connect directly to Resmed’s sleep health resources.

A Resmed 2026 Global Sleep Survey showed that the use of wearable technology to track sleep among adults increased from 16% in 2025 to 53% in 2026.

An estimated 80% of people with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a chronic condition that disrupts breathing during sleep, remain undiagnosed.

Untreated OSA is associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease and hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline, and depression.

Whitaker envisions a time when wearable technology is seamlessly integrated with electronic health records, AI analytics, and telemedicine. He told The MAHA Report that wearables offer the promise of earlier intervention, and they empower patients to actively participate in their own care.

“Real-time health insights empower people to prevent disease rather than wait for issues to worsen,” Whitaker explained. “In addition, better health data can make doctor visits more informed and productive.”

People can notice changes and trends in their health earlier by shifting health monitoring from a once-a-year office visit to the ongoing practice of using wearable technology before complications develop or chronic conditions progress, Whitaker said.

For patients already under medical care, wearable-generated data can provide greater visibility and additional context for clinicians to support more personalized care, Whitaker added.

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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth introduced the program in a video captioned “The High-T Department of War,” saying the screening is “about restoring and optimizing natural capabilities, protecting longevity, and ensuring the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”

Younger service members may request screening as well. Anyone found deficient may elect testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), a choice Hegseth leaves to each individual.

The conventional view

Upon learning about the required screening, conventional health experts were skeptical. Reuters questioned six experts about whether the screening would improve readiness, and five worried it could lead to unnecessary or harmful treatment.

It is true that supplemental testosterone lowers a man’s sperm count, affecting fertility.

“Many in our armed forces are young men who are not done having their families,” said Dr. Kevin McVary, a urologist who serves on the medical advisory board of the telehealth platform, Rugiet. “If you just dole out the testosterone, the testes will shrink.”

The American Urological Association (AUA) and the Endocrine Society advise treatment only for men with confirmed deficiency plus symptoms, a standard built to treat established disease rather than to restore function. The AUA estimates up to a third of men on TRT fall short of those criteria.

A decline that starts before enlistment

Hegseth built the policy around age, which is why the testing starts at 30. The problem is that a man in his twenties today already has less testosterone than a man his age had in 1999. He shows up to the recruiting office already low, and no one checks for another 10 years.

Testosterone levels in a healthy man between 19 and 39 typically run between 264 and 916 nanograms per deciliter, and the AUA sets the threshold for deficiency at 300. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data on 4,045 men aged 15 to 39 shows mean total testosterone falling from 605 nanograms per deciliter in 1999 to 451 by 2016. That drop held in men of normal body weight, even after accounting for age, race, activity, smoking and alcohol.

Normal is not the same as optimal. Reference ranges come from the existing population, so as testosterone falls across a generation, the definition of normal falls with it. A 25-year-old who is told his level of 320 is fine clears the threshold for disease but doesn’t have the hormone profile of a healthy young man.

Nothing in human genetics explains a 25% drop in 16 years, but the environment does. Toxins in the food, the water and the packaging now affect military readiness as much as training does. Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates, both used in food packaging, suppress the pituitary signal that tells the testes to produce testosterone.

Atrazine and glyphosate, among the most heavily applied herbicides in agriculture, damage testicular tissue and interfere with testosterone synthesis. A 2024 study found microplastic particles in every human testicle examined. Those exposures reach a young man decades before a recruiter does, which puts the real cause of the problem outside the Pentagon’s reach .

What testosterone does under load

Testosterone does more than build muscles. A 1996 study found that healthy men given testosterone gained muscle size and strength with or without exercise. A follow-up study in men 18 to 35 showed that as testosterone rose, so did lean mass, muscle size, strength and power, while body fat decreased.

Testosterone also acts on dopamine pathways that determine motivation and effort. Athletes given testosterone before a physical stressor reported feeling calmer and more confident under strain.

The high physical and mental demands of military training, along with a caloric deficit, can drastically lower a man’s testosterone. Eight weeks of the Army’s most demanding course drives levels down to the range of a castrated man, and it takes roughly six weeks to recover. However, when the Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine put men through 28 days of hard training, the group given testosterone gained muscle while the control group had no gains.

What measuring can and cannot do

Last year, on December 10, Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, the Harvard urologist who pioneered modern testosterone therapy, spoke at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Expert Panel on Testosterone Replacement Therapy for Men. Low levels warrant treatment whether or not symptoms appear, he argued. “You could make a very strong argument that having a normal testosterone level is important for health and prevention of illness,” he said.

TRAVERSE, the largest cardiovascular trial ever run on testosterone therapy, followed more than 5,200 men and found no increase in cardiovascular events among men treated with testosterone compared to placebo. The FDA has since removed its black box warning on testosterone.

Hegseth’s order treats men 30 and older, and it is worth doing. But supplementing a 35-year-old sergeant does nothing for the teenager who will one day replace him, the one absorbing the same plastics and pesticides now and likely to enlist with even less than the sergeant started with. Screening and TRT manage the deficit without touching what created it.

Fixing that means going after the exposures that lower a young man’s testosterone long before he is old enough to enlist. It means getting endocrine-disrupting chemicals out of the food, the water, and the packaging–the BPA and phthalates and pesticide residues that suppress the hormonal signal at its source. It means feeding young men real food, including meat and animal fats, rather than the processed or plant-only diets that leave the body short of what it needs to make testosterone.

And it means encouraging both men and women to pick up weights, because few things support healthy testosterone and hormone balance as reliably as heavy, progressive strength training. This is the foundation the MAHA movement is built on, and it reaches the problem years before a testosterone test ever could.

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The couple – both scientists, physicians, and lifelong farmers – have produced a wonderfully useful book that is part memoir, part how-to guide, and part clear-eyed examination of how American food and farming systems have drifted away from any respect for consumers’ health.

What holds the three strands together is a conviction tested across six farms and four decades: that genuine well-being begins not in a clinic or pharmacy but in living soil, purposeful work, and the daily habits of people who take responsibility for what they grow and eat.

The Malones write with the authority of people who have actually done the hard things. They describe arriving on a worn-out Virginia property with no well, no power, no septic system, and twelve draft horses that needed fencing immediately.

They lived for a time in a battered 400-square-foot office trailer purchased on Craigslist, bathing outdoors and using a porta-potty while they rebuilt. Earlier, on a Maryland farm whose house had once hosted motorcycle-gang parties, they leveled a sloping bedroom floor with bricks and contended with blacksnakes and a spring box.

Such stories are not romanticized. The authors refuse to soften failures or gild rewards. The result is a narrative that feels genuine and makes their eventual successes—living soil where there had been compacted red clay, a sixty-tree orchard, mini Jersey cattle, a thriving chicken flock—all the more persuasive.

The book is filled with practical knowledge distilled from years living on the land.

Part II functions as a generous, experience-based primer. Readers learn why habit stacking and simple organizational systems (including an enthusiastic defense of mason jars) matter on a working homestead; how to select crops by climate zone, manage pests without reflexive chemical dependence, save seed, and extend the season; why raised beds and attention to aesthetics can make intensive gardening sustainable; and how to begin with laying hens while avoiding the complications of roosters.

The chapters on livestock are particularly useful for readers new to homesteading. The Malones walk through the relative merits and demands of sheep, goats, dairy cattle, grass-fed beef, pigs, turkeys, horses, and guardian dogs. Their treatment of living soil—cover crops, compost, reduced tillage, the quiet work of earthworms and mycorrhizal networks—is scientifically grounded and accessible. They argue, convincingly, that regenerative practices are less a fashionable innovation than a return to methods that older farmers and Amish communities never fully abandoned.

The scientific and policy sections in Part III give the personal and practical material larger stakes. The authors examine the metabolic consequences of ultra-processed diets, the inflammatory nature of modern obesity, the nutrient declines documented in USDA data over decades, and the persistent residues of widely used herbicides.

In their book, the authors also discuss raw milk with unusual balance—acknowledging both documented risks and observational evidence of potential benefits, while describing their own carefully managed consumption.

The book’s tone remains measured: structural problems in agricultural policy and food systems are real, yet the authors refuse despair.

Their prescription is incremental and empowering. Eat differently. Grow something. Source more deliberately. Reduce unnecessary chemical exposure at home. Invest in the next generation’s relationship to land and food.

Homesteading, in their telling, is not a destination for total self-sufficiency but a map toward greater agency.

The book’s greatest strength is its refusal to create false binaries. One need not abandon modern life or move to forty-five acres to begin. A balcony tomato plant, a small raised bed, a few hens, or simply cooking from whole ingredients already shifts the relationship between you and your plate.

The Malones themselves maintained demanding scientific and clinical careers while building farms. They write as people who have lost equity, started over, and still believe the work is worth doing. That combination of realism and conviction is rare and valuable and heartening.

Homesteading for Health is ultimately a book about stewardship—of soil, of animals, of family health, and of a measure of personal freedom. It reminds readers that the most radical act available to many of us may be the quiet, repetitive one of putting seeds in the ground, turning compost, collecting eggs, and feeding ourselves from land we have helped restore.

At a time when too many Americans seek quick answers and instant gratification, the Malones offer something refreshingly tangible: the possibility that health and resilience can still be cultivated, one season at a time, by ordinary people with the courage to get dirt under their nails.

[Homesteading for Health was published by MAHA Books, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, on August 4, 2026. It’s available on Amazon, here.]

In an exclusive interview with The MAHA Report, Arvin Singh, West Virginia’s Secretary of Health, talked about why the state believes it can become a national model for rural health transformation and what it will take to get there.

Singh has built a career that spans healthcare operations, executive leadership and federal policy. Today, as West Virginia’s Secretary of Health, he leads one of the country’s largest state-run rural health transformation initiatives.

With roughly $200 million in federal Rural Health Transformation funding from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for 2026, to be spent over five years, West Virginia has big plans. It will invest in prevention of chronic disease, workforce development, technology, value-based care and rural access. But the most significant part of the plan may be what West Virginia is choosing not to do: pour money into the same healthcare model that has too often failed to reach rural communities.

“An Ultimate Stress Test”

Singh explained that his varied career, including training at John Hopkins and stints at the Department of Health & Human Services and the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has allowed him to see both the extraordinary power of American medicine and the consequences of waiting until disease is already advanced. His experience across academic health systems, federal policy, community-based care and rural healthcare shaped his belief that prevention must become as central to the system as treatment.

“Our system is exceptional at treating illness, but historically, we’ve underinvested in preventing it,” he said during our interview. “We spend an enormous amount of resources after someone develops diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, but comparatively little helping them avoid those conditions in the first place.”

For Singh, prevention is not a rejection of modern medicine. It is a way to reduce the need for intensive, costly care, improve quality of life, strengthen the workforce and help public dollars go further.

“It’s not about replacing treatment,” he said. “It’s about reducing that need for treatment.”

That philosophy is especially consequential in West Virginia, which Singh describes as an “ultimate stress test for the American healthcare system.”

Added Singh, “If healthcare can succeed here with our mountains, with our dispersed population, our older residents, workforce shortages, high chronic disease burden and rural hospital challenges, I really think it can succeed anywhere.”

The scale of those challenges is difficult to overstate. West Virginia ranks 49th in overall health. Rural residents live about 2.5 years less than the national average, while life expectancy in McDowell County is approximately 11 years shorter. Nearly half of the state’s counties are maternity-care deserts, and every rural county was designated a Health Professional Shortage Area as of June 2025. The state also ranks last nationally in internet availability, complicating efforts to expand telehealth and remote monitoring.

West Virginia’s response is not limited to recruiting more physicians or building larger hospitals. Instead, the state is developing a broader model that brings care closer to residents through telehealth, artificial intelligence, emergency medical services, community-based interventions and value-based care.

A proposed Connected Care Grid would combine telehealth, remote patient monitoring and local care coordination, potentially extending access through schools, libraries, pharmacies, faith communities and community centers. Other initiatives would link medical and community transportation, expand community paramedicine and use rural EMS providers for chronic-disease follow-up and nonemergency care.

Together, these efforts challenge the assumption that meaningful healthcare must always begin inside a hospital or physician’s office. The larger goal is to prove that prevention-focused, community-based care can improve health outcomes.

“If your healthcare model only works where there are plenty of physicians, hospitals and resources, it’s not a rural healthcare model,” Singh said.

A New Core Competency

West Virginia is putting nutrition into the clinical standard of care, requiring continuing education for doctors that treats food, sleep, movement and behavior change as core tools for preventing and managing disease.

“Nutrition, physical activity, sleep, behavior change – those should become core competencies, not electives,” Singh said. “Healthcare professionals should feel just as comfortable prescribing a healthy lifestyle as they are prescribing medications, when appropriate.”

Making Healthier Choices Possible

The prevention-first philosophy extends across West Virginia’s health agenda, from healthier school meals and restrictions on synthetic food dyes to nutrition education for physicians, physical-activity initiatives and an effort to limit soda purchases through SNAP. But the state’s experience also illustrates how difficult it can be to turn ambitious public-health goals into lasting policy. Two of its most closely watched initiatives are now entangled in separate federal court challenges.

West Virginia’s food-dye law began changing school meals in August 2025, when public school nutrition programs were directed to remove seven synthetic colors: Red 3, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2 and Green 3. A broader provision scheduled for 2028 would prohibit the manufacture or sale of foods containing those dyes, along with the preservatives butylated hydroxyanisole, or BHA, and propylparaben, throughout the state. The International Association of Color Manufacturers sued West Virginia officials, arguing in part that the law conflicts with federal regulation of FDA-approved additives and is unconstitutionally vague. A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the broader statewide restrictions while the case proceeds, although the school-meal requirements remain in effect.

The state’s attempt to restrict soda purchases through SNAP encountered a separate legal obstacle. West Virginia was part of a broader USDA initiative allowing states to test food-purchasing restrictions through federally approved SNAP demonstration waivers. The details varied by state: West Virginia targeted soda, while other participating states proposed restrictions on products such as candy, energy drinks, prepared desserts, and other sweetened beverages. By 2026, the USDA had approved such waivers in more than 20 states as part of the federal MAHA agenda, although only five state approvals – Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, and West Virginia – were directly at issue in the lawsuit.

In June 2026, a federal judge agreed that USDA had used the wrong legal authority and had not followed required procedures, vacating the approvals for the five states. The ruling did not conclude that improving nutrition through SNAP was an illegitimate goal; rather, it found that USDA could not pursue that goal through the waiver process it had chosen. West Virginia has since paused enforcement while officials consider their next legal and administrative steps.

These legal battles have intensified a larger debate over how government should promote healthier choices. Opponents of SNAP restrictions warn that they can stigmatize low-income families, create confusion at checkout and substitute government judgment for individual choice. Critics of school fitness assessments have similarly raised concerns that testing could embarrass children or reward athletic performance rather than health.

Singh said the aim is not to judge families or dictate every decision, but to create conditions in which healthier choices are genuinely possible.

“People shouldn’t have to overcome a million obstacles just to make one healthy decision,” he said. “The role of government is not to make every decision for people, but we can help foster environments where healthy choices become realistic and sustainable.”

That distinction is central to his approach. Singh argues that personal responsibility matters, but choices are shaped by the conditions in which people live. In some West Virginia communities, healthy food may be 45 minutes away, while sidewalks, transportation, childcare, reliable broadband and nearby medical providers may all be limited.

“What people outside Appalachia sometimes miss is that rural health isn’t simply medicine,” Singh said. “It’s infrastructure, it’s workforce, it’s transportation, it’s economic opportunity.”

He applied the same philosophy to school fitness assessments. Singh said the goal is not to rank children against one another, but to help each student measure progress from an individual starting point.

“We want every child, including those who have disabilities or different abilities, to experience success relative to where they start,” he said. “Progress, to me, matters more than ranking.”

He compared measuring fitness to tracking progress in reading or math: a way for schools to recognize growth, celebrate achievement and give children the skills and confidence to carry healthier habits into adulthood

.West Virginia will judge its rural-health investments by three broad standards: healthier people, improved access, and sustainability. Companies applying to take part in the WV Rural Health Transformation projects must present detailed sustainability plans, and funding may be reallocated if programs cannot demonstrate progress and a credible return for taxpayers.

Singh’s long-term vision is not a temporary campaign, but a cultural reset: healthier children entering adulthood, more providers reaching rural communities, employers investing in workforce wellness, grocery stores offering healthier options, and healthcare systems rewarded for keeping people well.

Even before the first dollars were awarded, he said, change had begun.

“The conversation has changed,” Singh said. “More importantly, I want people to say that West Virginia helped change the conversation.”

If the state succeeds, he believes its lessons will extend far beyond Appalachia.

“They will shape the future of healthcare across America.”

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I want to talk today about the two things that go into your children more than almost anything else — the food on their plates and the shots in their arms. And this week, for the first time in a very long time, we saw real progress on both. Real transparency. Real accountability. The kind of change MAHA has been fighting so hard for.

Let’s start with food. And let me tell you about something most Americans have never heard of, even though it’s been shaping what’s in their pantry for more than 65 years. It’s called the GRAS loophole. G-R-A-S. It stands for “Generally Recognized as Safe.”

Here’s how it works or at least how it’s supposed to work – and I promise you, when you hear this you’re going to be angry. Back in 1958, Congress passed an exemption. The idea was simple: you shouldn’t have to run salt, or vinegar, or flour through years of drug-style testing. Everybody knows they’re safe. Fine. That’s common sense. But watch what happened to that common-sense idea.

Over the decades — and especially after a procedural change in 1997 — that narrow little exemption got twisted into something monstrous. Today, a food company can invent a brand-new chemical, hire its own experts to declare it safe, put it straight into the food your kids eat for breakfast — and never tell the FDA a thing. Not one word. The government doesn’t review it. The government doesn’t even know it exists.

Think about what that means. The companies get to be their own judge, their own jury, and their own referee on whether the chemicals they profit from are safe for your family. That is the very definition of a conflict of interest. And the result is exactly what you’d expect: thousands of chemicals have been added into the American food supply with no independent research at all, and the FDA finds out there’s a problem after people start getting sick. But even then it’s hard to prove because the whole process is corrupt and the government agencies have a history of being captured.

We’ve been running a nationwide science experiment on our own children and the results are now in, and they are not good. We have the sickest children on earth.

But that is finally starting to change. This week the FDA proposed a new rule to close that loophole, the GRAS loophole. For the first time, companies would be required to notify the FDA whenever they decide a new ingredient is “safe.” The agency would build a public inventory so you and I can actually see what’s being put in our food. And there’d be a pathway to go back and review the substances already on the market. Transparency. The most basic thing a government owes its people in a democracy.

And it doesn’t stop there. HHS and USDA just submitted the federal government’s first-ever official definition of “ultra-processed foods.” Now, that might sound like a technicality, but it’s a big deal — because for years, the lack of a real definition has been used as an excuse to avoid studying this stuff seriously.

Secretary Kennedy has pointed out that ultra-processed foods now make up close to seventy percent of the American diet. Seventy percent. And more than one in five of our children is now obese. Those two facts don’t exist independently. You can’t fix a problem you refuse to even define — and now, finally, we’re defining it.

Now, let’s talk about the other thing going into our kids — vaccines. This week the president signed an executive order that does something MAHA has demanded for years: it puts parents back in the driver’s seat, and it puts real science back at the center of the conversation.

Here’s what it does. It establishes a new gold-standard set of childhood vaccine recommendations, cutting the list of routinely recommended core vaccinations down to eleven diseases — Secretary Kennedy notes the earlier HHS and CDC overhaul brought it from seventeen down to eleven. It removes hepatitis B, Covid -19, and influenza from the list of shots routinely recommended for all children. It recommends separating the measles, mumps, and rubella shot into three separate vaccines given at separate visits.

But now we have the option to space out vaccines across multiple visits. The president’s own example was roughly five visits in the first year of life, with a child getting about twenty percent of the old single-visit load each time.

And it’s built around one principle above all: parental choice. Parents who want their children to receive every vaccine on the old schedule can absolutely still do that, fully covered by insurance. Nothing is being taken away. But it protects religious and medical exemption rights, and it directs the Attorney General to pursue legal action against states that violate those exemptions. It encourages states — and note, twenty-eight of them have already diverged from the CDC since January — to write these recommendations into their school-enrollment laws, pointing to European countries that are able to keep measles vaccination rates high without heavy-handed school mandates. Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is crying foul, calling the recommendations “dangerous,” “so wrong” – and saying it is “putting children’s health at risk.” The only thing in danger here is their profits.

And here’s the part I love most. The order directs continued, serious research — into vaccine safety, and into the real causes of autism — through the NIH’s Autism Data Science Initiative, ARPA-H, the National Toxicology Program, and the reinstated Task Force on Safer Childhood Vaccines, with a full response required within ninety days. Because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? For years, anyone who asked a hard question about the childhood schedule got shouted down with those three little words: “the science is settled.” But the science is never settled. It never has been and never will be. Real science welcomes questions. Real science says, ‘If you’re so sure, then study it in the open and prove it.’

The only people afraid of honest research are the people who don’t like where it might lead. This executive order gives Americans direct access to HHS’s own scientific assessment — going around the court rulings that had been holding all of this up.

Public trust gets rebuilt through transparency. Through honesty. Through dismantling the captured public health establishment that spent a generation destroying that trust, and betting we’d never find out.

Consider Dr. Anthony Fauci. Last week, Dr. Fauci was held in contempt of Congress, and the matter was referred to the Department of Justice. In recent investigations, buried in more than thirty-four thousand text messages, Fauci himself acknowledged that a covid vaccine dose in the first trimester “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage.”

And it gets worse. Investigations also found that one of the creators of mRNA vaccines wrote to Fauci to warn him that in pregnant animals, these particles were crossing the placenta and reaching the developing fetus. Now, what does an honest public servant do with a warning like that? He studies it. He tells the public. He lets mothers weigh the risk for themselves and make informed decisions.

But that is not what happened. Fauci’s first concern was not the finding — it was that the scientist wanted to hold a press conference, and what a mess that would make. He protected himself and ignored risks to a mother and her unborn child. He saw it as a PR problem to be managed. That is the old way. And that is precisely what this movement is bringing to an end.

That’s what connects food and vaccines. It’s the same fight, the same principle. Transparency over secrecy. Informed consent over blind faith. Parents over corporations. Real science over marketing slogans. For a generation, powerful interests got to decide what went into our children’s bodies without ever having to show their work. That era is ending. And today we are celebrating that.

On today’s show, you’ll hear from Dr. Eric Berg, “The Knowledge Doc”; human biologist, Gary Brecka; health coach and author of The Truth About Seed Oils, Liana Werner-Gray; Russell Brand, comedian and author; Jeffrey Tucker, founder and President of the Brownstone Institute; molecular toxicologist and activist. Dr. Alexandra Muñoz; Marla Maples, co-founder of The Global Wellness Forum and The Marla Maples Foundation; and Austin Rogers, candidate for Congress in Florida.

First up we have a leader and a legend in traditional food, Sally Fallon. She is an author, nutrition educator, and the founding president of the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) and the founder of Campaign for Real Milk. She is the owner of a farm which produces raw cheese and raw milk from pastured cows, pastured meats and grass-fed poultry and eggs. She most recently wrote The Truth About Contagion. Her best selling book, Nourishing Traditions, blends scientific research, culinary expertise, and advocacy to promote diets rich in whole, nutrient-dense foods. A generation of children can thank her for their good health! Welcome Sally!

[A full recording of the August 12, 2026 Media Hub will be available on YouTube by noon EST on 8/13.]

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“We’ve been advocating for raw milk for 25 years,” she tells The MAHA Report.

What’s so great about raw milk? It has more nutrients. And more butterfat.

Butterfat, Morell says, is the stuff of life. It was only taken out of milk and skim milk popularized, she explains, because butterfat was worth more if it could be sold separately, to put in ice cream.

“If you give skim milk to calves, they die,” she says.

Morell is the author of the best-selling book Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, which she wrote along with co-author Mary Enig, a biochemist. They originally self-published the book in 1996 because no other publisher was interested. It’s since sold more than 800,000 copies and is now represented by publishing giant Simon & Schuster.

Nourishing Traditions is a cookbook, but it’s also about how to eat so as to nourish the body and the mind. It doesn’t follow a low-fat or a low-carb diet.

“We think they’re very dangerous,” Morell says of both of these. “We do need carbs. But mostly we need a lot of fat in our diets.”

Sally Fallon was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1948 and grew up in a family that cared about eating right.

“My father railed against fake food, and my mother was a wonderful cook,” she says.

She married and raised her own children the way she was raised: eating real, homemade food. But by the 70s, the American diet was starting to change. Low-fat diets were creeping in.

“I just knew that this was wrong, and it was about that time I found Weston Price’s book,” says Morell.

Weston A. Price was a dentist who had traveled the world and studied what indigenous people ate. He took along a camera and photographed the faces of people he met. What he found, and what he reported in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, was fascinating, and somewhat controversial.

He wrote that native cultures that ate the same traditional foods that their ancestors had eaten for centuries had wide faces and healthy teeth, but that the people who had changed their diets and begun to eat things like white flour and sugar and other foods that were not traditionally eaten by their people tended to have longer, thinner faces, and crooked teeth.

The preference for animal fat among native diets was something Weston took particular note of.

“They would not eat lean meat,” says Morell. “They would throw an animal out if it was too lean.”

To share this research, and to share with more people the principles of eating food that is deeply nourishing, Morell and Enig founded the Weston A. Price Foundation in 1999 and in the year 2000, organized the first national conference.

The Weston A. Price Foundation now has over 400 chapters across the country, with local chapters focused on helping people find good, healthy food in their communities – and raw milk. The foundation actually has its own website to promote raw milk: realmilk.com with a map showing people where, in every state, they can buy raw milk – that is, milk that has not been pasteurized or homogenized.

Three years ago, in 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the keynote speaker at the annual conference, called Wise Traditions.

At his appearance there, on the stage with Morell, he said that after attending the conference the year before, he’d begun to drink raw milk and only raw milk.

Morell says they were “thrilled” when Kennedy was nominated to serve as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration – putting him essentially in charge of all federal public health policy.

Like Kennedy, the Weston A. Price Foundation has also been critical of vaccines.

“They are poisonous,” says Morell. “The best way to protect your children is with nutrition.”

Members of the foundation have also gone to war against soy, which was pushed as a meat alternative in the 70s and 80s and into the 90s – and even made its way into infant formula.

“We’ve been largely successful,” says Morell. “These soy foods have disappeared from the supermarket.”

Notably, Morell has published a recipe for infant formula made with raw milk and cod liver oil – a recipe that she says three of her five grandsons were fed as infants.

Morell, now 78, has not slowed down. She runs a farm in Southern Maryland, making cheese from the milk produced by her Jersey cows. And during the Covid pandemic she wrote a book called The Contagion Myth, with co-author Thomas S. Cowan, M.D, examining the connection between the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 and 5G wireless, which had just been deployed in Wuhan in 2019. They had to change the title to The Truth About Contagion as Amazon wouldn’t carry it under the original title. It was published by Skyhorse in 2021.

Morell is now preoccupied with organizing the 26^th annual “Wise Traditions” conference – the annual gathering of the Weston A. Price Foundation. The conference will be held October 16-18 in Washington, D.C., at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. The list of speakers includes Catherine Austin Fitts, Rep. Thomas Massie, Joel Salatin, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Del Bigtree, Leigh Merinoff, Laura Delano, Toby Rogers and many others.

The conference will focus on food: Not just talking about it, but enjoying it as a group, with meals thoughtfully prepared by a top chef from grassfed beef and also cheese and speciality items like sauerkraut from a local supplier.

This year’s event takes place at maybe the high point in the natural food movement, with practices once considered fringe – like drinking raw milk and saying no to vaccines – now being taken up by millions of Americans looking to lead healthier lives.

Many people deserve credit for the change. But Sally Fallon Morell is certainly among the most notable, given the popularity of her books and her continual advocacy through the Weston A. Price Foundation over more than a quarter of a century.

“I did feel that I was guided to do this,” she told The MAHA Report this month. “This kind of just took hold of me – and here I am.”

[To learn more about the conference, and to register, go to WiseTraditions.org.]

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Related

Interview with Mike Adams, the “Health Ranger” – August 2023

https://www.brighteon.com/50ad823d-dca3-4f77-bf09-58756b8c8e3c

But it was only during the pandemic, when he played a central role in organizing the Great Barrington Declaration opposing lockdowns, that he became known to millions of Americans who were dismayed by the government’s response to Covid and looking for voices of reason.

Tucker’s political journey began in earnest in the 1980s when he studied economics at Texas Tech University and in graduate school at George Mason University. He volunteered at the Mises Institute’s Washington office. He then went to work in Ron Paul’s foundation office as his private researcher.

He was initially a supporter of President Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s election in 1980 was about more than the state of the economy: It was also about economic theory, particularly debates between the interventionist theories of the Keynesians and the reformist agenda of the Monetarists of the Chicago School.

By the end of the 1980s, Tucker rejected both and, instead, became a leading young advocate for the Austrian school – an economic theory predicated on sound money, typically expressed in pieces of gold. He also met Murry Rothbard in 1985 and maintained a close friendship until Rothbard’s death in 1995.

In 1992, Tucker joined the Mises Institute as editorial vice president, a role he held until 2011. In that position, he helped transform Mises.org into one of the preeminent online resources for Austrian economics, dramatically expanding its reach through digital innovation, open-access publishing, and high-quality content. He also wrote several books that helped popularize and shape modern libertarian thought by promoting the ideas of the institute’s namesake, Ludwig von Mises, and also Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and contemporary scholars and commentators.

After 2011, Tucker joined Laissez Faire Books as executive editor, and then editorial director of the Foundation for Economic Education, a position he held until 2016. Tucker was an early pioneer of eBooks offered to the public at no charge..

During Covid, Tucker became disillusioned with the libertarian movement. “I realize now why so many on the left, right, and the libertarians all fell apart when confronted with realities of the microbial kingdom,” Tucker said. “It’s because people in narrow disciplines never study this so they are inclined to defer to experts.”

The Covid era shifted Tucker’s focus and the course of his life. “Now I’m interested in all kinds of medical freedom issues, including those which affect foods,” he says. “I used to cheer junk food as just fine, a product of capitalism. I’m now mortified that I ever believed that. I’m much more crunchy than I used to be. I see now that the agencies in Washington are there mostly to protect big business interests. That’s what leads to all the distortions of medicine, food, therapeutics, and so much more.”

When it comes to the infringement of liberties that took place beginning in 2020, Tucker does not blame the political class alone. Instead, he lays the blame at the feet of big business and how, according to Tucker, corporate interests manipulate big government, big media, and the legal profession to get their way.

“Consider vaccine mandates. They are a form of conscription,” Tucker said. “It’s remarkable that any society that calls itself free could mandate injections of any potion but here we are. It’s been going on for a very long time. Once the doctors can require you to taint your body with a concoction, all bets for long-run freedom in anything else are off. We have bodily autonomy or we do not.”

In the spring of 2021, with the pandemic still ravaging the country, Tucker founded the Brownstone Institute. It launched, publicly, that fall. “We set out to make it appear that we had always existed so it took a while for the proponents of lockdowns and mandates to figure out that we had just been founded,” Tucker said. Meanwhile, the influence grew. The Brownstone Institute website now attracts around a million readers per month.

Beyond web publishing, Brownstone also publishes books, funds fellowships, holds supper clubs coast to coast, and hosts retreats. Tucker writes a daily economics column for The Epoch Times. “The topics are diverse because I’m rather restless intellectually,” he says. “By my calculation, I’ve written more than 20,000 articles, so when someone says ‘I read all your stuff,’ I know for sure it is not true.”

At Brownstone, the authors and guest writers the institute invites are not expected to hold any specific ideological belief beyond a commitment to freedom. Who does Tucker fear more – the left or the right? “History shows that toggling between the left and the right is a way that tyranny entrenches itself,” he says. “Both can be used by the ruling classes to fasten despotism on the people. This is why it is in everyone’s interest to stay as philosophically independent as possible and to fix one’s mind and heart on something other than the god that has failed, which is the state.”

Earlier this year, he commissioned a poll jointly with Leslie Manookian, the founder and president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, a non-profit group. The poll, conducted by John Zogby Strategies, showed that supermajorities of Americans favor health freedom over top-down mandates.

“Jeffrey is not only a gifted writer and communicator, he’s a principled and relentless pursuer of truth,” Manookian tells us. “His grounding in both civil liberties and facts led to him founding Brownstone Institute – the organization that became the refuge of so many censored and ostracized researchers and scientists – and a beacon of light to scores of people seeking truth.”

Tucker is happy to not be in any ideological camp, and to entertain a broad range of ideas. “I adopted the tribe called libertarians but they collapsed during the Covid years, much to my amazement,” he told The MAHA Report. “I’ve now never been more independent. I’m happy to draw on any tradition of thought that makes sense with an eye toward knowing what is true. I also strive to be objective and open-minded. Tribal politics is not my way.”

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Instead of the current 72 doses of 17 different vaccines, the president’s order will have the CDC recommending vaccines for children for 11 different diseases.

The president’s order also directs that shots be spread across more visits and removes vaccines that children do not need from universal recommendations.

“Effective immediately, my administration is recognizing gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations for only 11 core vaccinations against the most serious and dangerous diseases,” President Trump said at a White House press conference announcing the change. “We want the MMR in three separate vaccinations given at separate times.”

Trump said he was also ordering that vaccines be spread out, with just one vaccine to be given at each doctor’s appointment, rather than four, five or more vaccines given during a single visit.

“At one year, you should have five separate visits for vaccines rather than getting them all in the same day,” said Trump.

The president added, “Vaccinations for hepatitis B, Covid-19, and influenza, among others, are no longer recommended for all children.”

The executive order came on the same day as texts released by Senator Ron Johnson revealed more troubling news about Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was running the federal response to the Covid pandemic at that time.

According to the texts, Fauci knew that the Covid vaccine administered to pregnant women would lead to a high rate of miscarriages. Fauci texted his concerns in a group chat with former CDC Director Rachelle Walensky and former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

Neither Fauci, Walensky, or Murthy informed the public and continued the policy calling for pregnant women to receive the Covid vaccine.

Data eventually emerged that pregnant women who received Covid vaccines indeed did suffer an alarming rate of miscarriage.

Senator Johnson promised to reveal more information from Fauci’s texts in the coming days.

The executive order marks a turning point in medical decision making, taking absolute authority away from entrenched vaccinology ‘experts.’ Going forward, parents will have more control of their children’s vaccinations.

States which have removed religious exemptions and made medical exemptions to vaccination will soon face challenges from the U.S. Department of Justice.

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya noted that European countries have higher vaccination rates without resorting to mandates. He views the executive order as a way to re-establish trust in public health recommendations after the failures of the Covid pandemic response

Monday’s White House press conference also focused on autism. President Trump said the increase in autism may be linked to vaccine injuries, and HHS Secretary Kennedy added environmental causes as a key factor. Refuting the oft cited belief from mainstream medicine that autism is solely caused by genes, Kennedy said, “There cannot be an epidemic caused by genes. There has to be an environmental cause.”

Kennedy promised that the health agencies will begin releasing new autism research over the next ninety days.

The legacy media and vaccinology establishment recoils at the notion of a link between vaccine injury and autism. However, a social-legal research paper in 2011, “Unanswered Questions from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: A Review of Compensated Cases of Vaccine-Induced Brain Injury,” reveals that the U.S. government has compensated vaccine injuries that resulted in autism.*

While you’ll never read this in the legacy media, there is enough research linking vaccine injury and autism, and other health problems, to fill a book. One such book is Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak, by Dr. Brian Hooker and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Still, following the president’s EO, the pharma-funded American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) went on the offensive, issuing a statement from its president, Andrew D. Racine. “Today’s executive order on vaccines is not only disheartening but dangerous,” it read in part.

And on CNN, which openly states that many of its programs are “brought to you by Pfizer,” Jake Tapper told his viewers that the medical and scientific communities are “horrified and pushing back.”

Tapper presented two mainstream medical ‘vaccine experts’ – Dr. Paul Offit and Dr. Richard Besser – who criticized the president’s order as “unscientific.”

No one supporting the president’s order appeared on the broadcast.

Offit has made millions on developing a Rotavirus vaccine and was awarded the Merck chair, according to Sharyl Attkisson. Besser is a former acting CDC Director who now runs the Robert Woods Foundation, started by the Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. Tapper did not disclose these ties to Big Pharma.

Offit and Besser criticized the decision to break up the MMR vaccine into separate shots, despite ample U.S. government data from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program demonstrating that the separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines produce far fewer injuries and deaths than a single MMR vaccine.

Tony Lyons, President of MAHA Action, expressed the opposite point of view to that of legacy media pundits: “Monday, by Executive Order, President Trump and HHS Secretary RFK Jr. stood up for parents, children, and informed consent. America’s kids will no longer face an endless stream of vaccines at every pediatric visit.”

Added Lyons, “Our schedule will now align with peer nations that have better health outcomes and less chronic disease. The measles vaccine will soon be offered in separate components. On Monday, this administration took a major step toward making America’s children healthy again.”

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GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) is a regulatory exemption that allows certain substances to be added to food without going through the FDA’s standard premarket approval process.

For HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the announcement represents the latest steps in the “Eat Real Food” initiative, an 18-month effort to put prevention and nutrition at the center of federal health policy.

“Parents should not need a chemistry degree to understand what their children are eating,” Kennedy said. “Americans deserve real transparency. They deserve real food.”

What the Policies Would Do

Under the proposed GRAS rule, companies introducing a new GRAS substance would be required to notify the FDA about how that substance is safe – moving the system from voluntary to mandatory notification.

Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantis said the change would “close a decades-old information gap” and give the agency greater visibility into substances entering the food supply.

The proposal would also create a public database showing which substances companies have determined are safe for use in food, while giving companies an expedited path to bringing ingredients already on the market into the new system.

The second proposal would establish a federal definition of ultra-processed foods, giving researchers, consumers and government institutions a common framework for identifying them [stay-tuned for the approved definition.]

Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a longtime food and chronic disease researcher, called the two actions among the FDA’s most consequential food and nutrition policies in the last 50 years. The new definition of ‘ultra-processed foods’ could have far-reaching implications, from changing what is purchased and served in schools, hospitals and military facilities, to pressuring food manufacturers to reformulate their products.

Why HHS Says It’s Necessary

By introducing these changes, the government is determined to provide Americans greater transparency into what is entering the food supply and how those substances are being deemed safe.

Kennedy said the FDA previously could not tell him exactly how many ingredients were in the food supply, estimating the number to range from 4,000 to 12,000.

HHS senior advisor, Calley Means, who has been working on the administration’s food policy initiatives, told The MAHA Report that “GRAS reform is one of the biggest initiatives that food advocates have been fighting for 20 years.”

The administration also celebrated broader changes over the past 18 months, including:

• Updated Dietary Guidelines

• Removing petroleum-based artificial dyes from the food supply

• Bringing nutrition education into medical schools

• Putting real food on the plates of military personnel

• Promoting regenerative agriculture

Generally Recognized as Safe

Congress created the GRAS exemption in 1958 alongside the Food Additives Amendments. The exemption was meant for substances with a long history of safe use, with examples including salt, vinegar and flour.

According to Diamantis, however, the exemption eventually became a primary pathway for food ingredients, allowing manufacturers to make their own GRAS determinations without notifying the FDA.

Food activist and author, Vani Hari, told The MAHA Report that food reform needs to be approached from multiple angles. She argued that getting Americans to eat more real food could also reduce consumption of GMO corn and soy, while adding that “we have to tackle it from every angle.”

Hilda Labrada Gore, a certified integrative health coach, similarly emphasized that removing harmful substances is only part of the solution: “It’s equally important to get the right foods in,” Gore said.

What’s Next?

The proposed GRAS rule is now open for public comment, giving the public an opportunity to weigh in before a final rule is issued.

Kyle Warner, vice president of MAHA Action, called the public-comment period an important opportunity for “all the MAHA moms and the MAHA advocates around the country” to make their voices heard.

The administration has also acknowledged that further congressional action may be necessary to give the FDA additional authority.

For Bethany Hall-Long, the stakes extend beyond food policy itself: “We know that a healthy community provides for a healthy economy,” she told The MAHA Report.

Chris Klomp, director of Medicare and a senior advisor to Kennedy, closed the event by returning to the broader MAHA mission: moving a health system focused on masking side effects toward one that helps Americans understand why they become sick in the first place.

“For the last fifteen years, I have stood beside millions of Americans who have simply wanted food that wouldn’t harm their families,” Hari added. “Today is a turning point. From this day forward, the rules for the food industry are changing, and everyone will finally know what’s hidden in ultra-processed food.”

[Electronic comments may be submitted to Regulations.gov, using docket number FDA-2025-N-3262.]

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Scientists at NYU Langone Health followed 1,450 pregnancies in New York City between 2016 and 2019 and found that women with more glyphosate in their urine during mid-pregnancy had 35% higher odds of delivering before 37 weeks, the point that marks a birth as premature.

“These results underscore the need for stronger regulations to protect the health of pregnant women and infants, two groups long known to be especially vulnerable to chemicals in the environment,” says Leonardo Trasande, MD, MPP, the study’s senior author and a professor of pediatrics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

The more glyphosate a woman carried in her urine between 18 and 25 weeks of pregnancy, the higher her odds of preterm birth. The same pattern did not appear when glyphosate was measured in the first months of pregnancy, only in the middle stretch between 18 and 25 weeks.

A Vulnerable Window

Preterm birth, defined as delivery before 37 weeks, is the leading cause of newborn death in the United States and affects roughly one in 10 births. Babies who arrive early face higher rates of breathing trouble and infection in their first fragile weeks and a greater likelihood of learning and developmental struggles in the years that follow.

Those rates have been climbing, up 12% between 2014 and 2022, a trend clinicians cannot fully explain. Many of the classic risk factors, like a mother’s age, are fixed and beyond anyone’s control, which is what makes a chemical exposure worth paying attention to, because unlike age, it is something that can actually be reduced.

How the Herbicide Acts on the Body

Laboratory work in animals and human cells points to several ways glyphosate could disturb a pregnancy. It interferes with estrogen production in human placental cells and, in animal studies, inflames and damages the placenta, the organ that delivers food and oxygen to a growing baby and shields it from harm. Because the placenta is vital to the life of the fetus, any damage to it reaches the baby directly.

Teresa Herrera, a doctoral candidate at NYU Grossman School of Medicine who led the study, says this is not an isolated discovery. “Our findings add to a growing body of evidence that exposure to glyphosate early in life may lead to health concerns that can echo throughout a lifetime,” she said.

A Chemical Almost Impossible to Avoid

What makes the finding so difficult to escape is how thoroughly glyphosate has saturated the American food supply. Its use in the U.S. rose roughly 100-fold between the 1970s and 2014, and its residues now turn up in the cereals, snack foods, and fresh produce Americans eat every day. Herrera noted that families concerned about the herbicide should choose organic grains and produce when possible, though she cautioned that individual choices alone will not solve a problem this widespread.

Toward a MAHA-Inspired Reset

Glyphosate falls under a federal pesticide law that weighs a chemical’s dangers against its usefulness to industry rather than judging it on health impacts alone, which is how a compound now tied to premature birth is still being sprayed across the American food supply.

For a quarter-century, regulators relied on a highly cited 2000 review, “Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans,” to support claims that glyphosate was safe. In December 2025, the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology retracted it – after finding it had been ghostwritten by Monsanto employees and built entirely on the company’s own unpublished data.

The NYU study’s authors argue that regulators have never seriously tested what glyphosate does to a developing pregnancy, and they call for the chemical to be re-examined for the danger it poses to mothers and unborn children.

In June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that federal pesticide law bars Americans from suing Roundup’s maker in state court for failing to warn them of the cancer risk, overturning a jury award to a man who blamed his cancer on the herbicide. Had it won, that state law would have opened the floodgates for tens of thousands of similar claims.

The decision handed Bayer-Monsanto the legal shield it had pursued for years, after the company had already paid more than $11 billion to settle cancer claims; it left plaintiffs who say they were harmed by Rounduo with few options in court.

Although the Trump administration has publicly supported the MAHA movement’s goal of reducing harmful chemical exposures, its Justice Department supported Monsanto’s legal position in the Supreme Court case. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said he will not interfere with the agency’s glyphosate review.

Meanwhile, MAHA leaders have accused the EPA of continuing to “approve, expand, and normalize chemical exposures” and criticized the appointment of former chemical-industry lobbyists to senior agency positions.

Professor Trasande also rejected the notion that weed control and healthy pregnancies are an unavoidable trade-off. “Organic farming methods can produce competitive yields, so the trade-off between weed control and long-term health risks is not as straightforward as is often portrayed,” he said.

The researchers stop short of claiming glyphosate directly causes preterm birth, but they plan to study the underlying mechanisms next.

Still, these researchers have already shown that a chemical found in over 80% of Americans threatens unborn babies with premature birth – and no U.S. agency responsible has done anything meaningful to protect pregnant women and their children from this danger.

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[The below Opinion piece was published on August 7, 2026 by The Epoch Times. Republished with permission from the author.]

A nation born in agronomy should never interfere with the rights of farmers to process and sell their own meat. New Hampshire is now presented with the opportunity to reinforce that right for the first time in a century.

Why is this even necessary? Restricting meat processing was an early intervention in commercial freedom. The year was 1906, the dawn of the Progressive Era. The new meat-processing industry was in trouble from bad press. Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle” had become a best seller at a time when people were going wild for new books. The book caused profits to collapse and a huge return to traditional ways.

The new industry organized, facing a threat to its profits, to get the federal government to declare their products safe with new inspections. Added benefit: inspections were expensive so only the biggest players could afford them, hence squeezing out the little guys. Mainly, it was an attempt to subvert the instincts of the people. The cost: the rights of those who raise the animals to slaughter and process them were practically abolished.

It was a disastrous decision on many levels and has contributed heavily to the gradual but unrelenting decline of the family farm in this country. But at long last, one state is working to restore that freedom in light of rising prices for meat. It’s New Hampshire and the bill is HB 396. It passed both houses of Congress before it was vetoed by the governor following heavy lobbying by the meat-processing industry.

Now there is a chance for the veto to be overridden.

What Else Are They Hiding?

The bill seeks to allow limited on-farm or non-USDA-certified processing of cattle, swine, sheep, and goats for in-state sale. It permits the slaughter and process of 3 cattle, 5 swine, or 10 sheep/goats in a month. It insists on humane slaughter methods and carcasses to be refrigerated at or below 41°F within 12 hours.

The product must be clearly labeled. But then it can be sold directly from the farm, at farm stands or farmers’ markets, or to licensed restaurants and retailers (with record-keeping and menu/product labeling requirements). It’s not full freedom but it is a crucial step in the right direction. It could save many family farms, and promote health as well.

It addresses a serious crisis. In 1940 the United States had 6.9 million farms. Today there are only 1.9 million. The U.S. cattle herd is at its lowest level since 1951. U.S. farmers are faced with a meat-processing bottleneck, the result of 4 companies controlling 85 percent of U.S. beef and 67 percent of pork processing. Meanwhile, the U.S. imports 16–18 percent of the beef it consumes.

The bill permits farmers to circumvent slaughterhouse bottlenecks, and encourage farmers to increase their herds, reducing prices. It will allow consumers to choose where their meat comes from. It will improve profitability for livestock farmers. It will challenge the cartelization of meat processing that currently exists. It will breathe new life into custom slaughterhouses, most of which shut down in recent decades.

There is only one reason for the resistance to this common-sense reform: the power of big industry that wants to maintain its monopoly and keep prices high. In any legislative battle these days, the great challenge is to overcome such lobbying efforts and grant more freedom to the people.

The main challenge here from an economic standpoint is to allow the farmer to capture a greater share of the profit from making food. In 1970, 70 percent of what you paid for meat at the grocery store went to the rancher. In 2025, only about 30 percent got back to the rancher. The rest goes to Big Ag and Big Food, due to consolidation and monopolization in food industries.

This bill helps bust up the monopoly in at least one state. The need is reaching the desperation point. Big Ag owns ever more and the small farmer and rancher ever less. This is in major part due to restrictions on the ability to process meat on the farm itself. This government-induced monopoly imposes enormous costs that only Big Agriculture can afford.

​Keep in mind that on-site processing was the normal way of doing things for all of human history, including in American history. That changed with the growth of off-site meat processing in the late 19th century. There was nothing wrong with the idea. No one minds a new industrial innovation. The industry grew and grew, along with other industrial innovations at the time.

The problem came with growing sloppiness in the industry and the consumer revolt that ensued. Instead of just doing a better job, the dominant firms in the new industry came running to government for help. They lobbied for what became the Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Government promised to guarantee the quality of processed meat while restricting on-site processing. It never actually did that. In fact, after government inspectors took over, the meat became less safe due to primitive methods that farmers had long avoided. This time, sloppy methods and less safety came with a government guarantee of quality.

The single most urgent industrial reform we can take in this country is to reverse that unfortunate trend with one simple method: allow freedom like the Founding generation wanted.

This was at the very beginning of the so-called Progressive Era, which was not progress toward anything but industrial technocracy. The single most urgent industrial reform we can take in this country is to reverse that unfortunate trend with one simple method: allow freedom like the Founding generation wanted.

Overriding the governor’s veto would be a magnificent victory for the rights of owners and the thriving of farms in an area of the country where it is essential. It’s not enough but it is a step in the right direction. As it is, the wait times and travel costs of commercial processing are intolerable. This bill would encourage the flourishing of local meat raised and processed by our friends and neighbors, just like it used to be.

New Hampshire is the place for the revolution to begin. Of all state legislatures, it is the one that is most connected to the people. It has fully 400 members with Republicans in the majority. We need a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate to override, and can only get there with a bipartisan vote. Democrats who are not paid off by industry have every reason to support a veto as a strong statement of the rights of property and the will of the people.

Should the veto be overridden, it will be a moment of great celebration for food freedom and the restoration of local agriculture. It could also save the livelihoods of small farmers. It’s a beginning, not enough, but a good place to start.

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That senator is Kentucky’s Dr. Rand Paul, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In introducing Dr. Paul during the weekly MAHA Media Hub on Wednesday, MAHA Action president Tony Lyons referred to him as “our very own MAHA hero,” “a fighter for free speech” and a “warrior against corrupt science.” Lyons also praised him for his years-long mission to hold Fauci accountable for his actions.

“What he’s done with Fauci is such an epic moment,” Lyons said, “that we should celebrate because it was so hard to get here, because we had the most powerful health official in the world telling us lies every day.”

Sen. Paul’s fight to get to the truth about the origin of Covid-19 began six years ago when he was virtually alone among U.S. senators asking then NIAID director Fauci why he wasn’t talking about natural immunity, why he was urging that schools be closed when so few children had died from the virus or become seriously ill, and why he didn’t show more humility when it was clear that many of the early predictions about the new coronavirus had been wrong.

At a May 12, 2020 hearing where Fauci was testifying before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, then committee chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) said that testing and vaccines would be the key to re-opening the American economy.

It was Sen. Paul, a physician prior to being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2010, who turned the focus on something very different: Herd immunity.

The media, he told Fauci, was continuing to report that there was no evidence that patients who survived the new coronavirus had immunity.

“I think actually the truth is the opposite,” said Sen. Paul. “We have no evidence that survivors of coronavirus don’t have immunity, and a great deal of evidence that suggests that they do.”

Sen. Paul urged Fauci to clarify publicly what he’d told the committee – that in all likelihood, people recovering from Covid-19 did have natural immunity, and would not likely get the virus a second time.

At that hearing in the summer of 2020, Sen. Paul also pointedly questioned the public health advice to close schools, saying it made no sense to have a national strategy to close all schools, and that the power to make decisions about school closures should not come from Washington, and from a single person. He also warned of the effect of school closures on learning.

“If we keep kids out of school for another year, what’s going to happen is the poor and underprivileged kids who don’t have a parent that’s able to teach them at home are not going to learn for a full year,” he said.

It’s remarkable to look back at this hearing and to see that so many things that Sen. Paul said early on turned out to be prescient.

In school districts across the country where schools remained closed or operated virtually for the 2020-2021 school year, many children fell behind in reading and math, with the learning loss so severe in cities like Indianapolis and Chicago that three years later, the gaps in academic performance were still significant.

In that hearing, Sen. Paul had also urged Fauci to take a more moderate stance on states re-opening, and was the only senator who seemed to recognize that the pandemic wasn’t nearly as deadly as Americans were being made to believe.

“In rural states, we never really reached any sort of pandemic levels in Kentucky and other states,” he told Fauci. “We have less deaths in Kentucky than we have in an average flu season. It’s not to say this isn’t deadly. But really outside of New England, we’ve had a relatively benign course for this virus nationwide.”

Bringing Fauci to Testify

Sen. Paul said he and the committee he chairs had negotiated for months to try to get information from Fauci.

“We’d get a slow trickle, and then it would come to an end,” he said. “He had agreed to come in voluntarily for a deposition, and then they went up until like the day before the agreement, and they said, ‘No, he’s not coming in.’ So, finally, we lost patience and we sent him a subpoena.”

Sen. Paul said he’s been able to get a great number of documents, including those that constitute Fauci’s diary, thanks to the cooperation of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others in the Trump administration who also want to get to the truth.

“There were two things from January of 2020 that we found out that he was thinking and saying, but was saying completely the opposite, really during the rest of the pandemic,” said Paul.

The first one was an e-mail exchange that Fauci had with a colleague where he wrote that he and other scientists were worried about the virus because it appeared to have been manipulated in a lab.

“So I do believe he knew it all along and suspected it from the very moment,” said Paul, “but then immediately in public, the same scientists who were saying in private that it looked manipulated, immediately came out and said in public – No, no it is implausible that could have come from the lab.”

Paul notes that Fauci also wrote in his diary that in January of 2020, he’d talked to his counterpart in China, George Gao, and Gao had told him that the earliest cases of people falling ill in Wuhan weren’t related to the wet market, where exotic animals are sold, yet Fauci had continued to insist publicly that the wet market was the likely origin of the virus.

“The reason this dishonesty is incredibly important is that if it came from the lab, he bears responsibility for having funded the lab,” said Paul.

Last week, Fauci pleaded the Fifth, refusing to answer any questions from any of the senators.

For that, he faces contempt of Congress.

Rand Paul is the son of former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul, the de facto leader of the libertarian movement in America and a hero to many on the libertarian Right. He was raised in Texas, where his father worked as an obstetrician when not serving in office. He graduated from Baylor University in Texas and went on to the Duke University School of Medicine, earning his medical degree in 1988. Paul worked as an ophthalmologist in Bowling Green, Kentucky, from 1993 until he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2010, to replace Sen. Jim Bunning, who was retiring.

Throughout the pandemic Sen. Paul continued his pointed skepticism of public health authorities, focusing on the funding of gain-of-function research and its likely connection to the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

His pursuit of the truth about the nature of the virus and Fauci’s funding of gain-of-function research at the University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, exploded at a July 20, 2021 hearing where Fauci denied that the research the NIH had funded was gain-of-function research and told Paul that he didn’t know what he was talking about. Sen. Paul reminded Fauci that it was a crime to lie to the U.S. Congress and Fauci – an unelected bureaucrat – burst out: “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you!”

Then CDC director Robert Redfield said later that he watched that hearing and was shocked when Fauci denied that the research he was funding – to manipulate a coronavirus to make it more pathogenic and more easily transmissible – was gain-of-function research.

Sen. Paul was unflappable in this hearing, and at the hearings that have followed, continuing his focused questioning of Fauci and other witnesses, never raising his voice and refusing to be deterred from the pursuit of the truth about Covid-19.

Who made it and where? And what was it?

At last week’s hearing, Sen. Paul told Fauci: “The decision to fund gain-of-function research In Wuhan, China, will likely go down as one of the worst public health decisions. Frankly, the American people deserve an apology.”

He asked Fauci to admit that the risks of this research had clearly exceeded any benefit, to apologize and ask forgiveness. It was true he hadn’t personally ordered every lockdown, said Paul, “...but officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions. And you presented your recommendations not as judgements, open to debate, but as dictates of science itself.”

Continued Dr. Paul, “More than a million Americans died from COVID-19. Many of them died alone. Workers were forced to choose between a mandate and a job they needed. Businesses closed and never reopened. Children lost years of school they will never get back. Americans lost the freedom to work, to worship, and to decide what went into their own bodies. Nothing we do today can undo those losses. But silence does not honor them either. The American people deserve answers.”

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[The below was first published in The Baltimore Sun, here. Reprinted with permission from Armstrong Williams]

Few public officials have become as recognizable or as polarizing as Dr. Anthony Fauci.

For decades, he served as one of the nation’s leading public health officials, advising presidents of both parties through HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika, COVID-19 and other public health crises. During the pandemic, however, he became something far different: one of the most influential unelected officials in America. His recommendations shaped school closures, business shutdowns, travel restrictions, vaccine policies and countless aspects of daily life for hundreds of millions of Americans.

Those decisions carried enormous consequences.

Families lost businesses they had spent a lifetime building. Children lost valuable classroom instruction and social development. Churches closed their doors. Weddings were postponed. Funerals were held with only a handful of mourners. Workers were forced to choose between complying with mandates or losing their livelihoods. The economic, educational and emotional costs of the pandemic response are still being measured years later.

Against that backdrop, recent congressional testimony has renewed public interest in Fauci’s role during those extraordinary years.

Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during questioning in a Senate hearing. The Fifth Amendment is a cornerstone of the Constitution, and every American has the right to rely upon it. Exercising that right is not, by itself, evidence of guilt or innocence.

But constitutional rights do not eliminate legitimate public questions.

Many Americans have asked why a public official whose decisions affected nearly every household in the nation would decline to answer questions before Congress, particularly after receiving a presidential pardon covering specified federal conduct. Whether the pardon was necessary or not, it inevitably intensified public curiosity rather than resolving it.

Transparency matters because trust matters.

Trust is retrospective as well as prospective. People make judgments about whether an individual or institution can be trusted going forward based on whether there has been an honest account of what has been done previously. A truthful reckoning can repair lost credibility while continued evasion further erodes trust. An enormous opportunity to repair a relationship was lost yesterday. There is a cost to silence.

Another aspect of the public debate concerns Fauci’s financial success. During his government career, he became one of the highest-paid federal employees, earning a substantial government salary over many years. Since leaving public office, he has also earned significant income through speaking engagements, book contracts and other opportunities available to prominent public figures.

There is nothing inherently improper about earning money legally after public service.

The real question is different.

How should Americans evaluate a public servant whose influence over national policy was unprecedented, while millions of ordinary citizens absorbed the financial and personal costs of those policies?

That question deserves an honest discussion, not because success should be criticized, but because accountability should never depend on status.

Critics have also argued that, during both the Trump and Biden administrations, Fauci exercised an extraordinary degree of independent influence over public messaging and pandemic policy. Supporters contend he followed the science as he understood it. Critics argue that he often appeared to function as an independent policymaker rather than simply a scientific adviser.

Reasonable people continue to disagree about those judgments.

What should not be controversial is the principle that no public official elected or unelected should be beyond scrutiny.

Congress exists in part to examine the decisions of government officials. That oversight is not political revenge. It is one of the Constitution’s safeguards against excessive concentration of power.

The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped American life unlike any event in generations. The decisions made during that period deserve careful examination, not to refight every debate, but to prepare for the next national emergency.

Americans deserve clear answers about how major decisions were made, what information was available at the time, where mistakes occurred and what lessons have been learned.

Accountability is not about humiliating individuals.

It is about restoring public confidence.

If mistakes were made, acknowledge them. If judgments proved incorrect, explain why. If policies produced unintended harm, say so honestly. Democracies become stronger when leaders are willing to answer difficult questions instead of allowing uncertainty to linger.

The cost of reckoning deferred is not abstract. We learned during Wednesday’s hearing that Fauci, as early as February 2020, was privately sympathetic to the theory that the virus emerged from the Wuhan laboratory. We learned that he knew, even then, of evidence that the DNA sequence of the virus suggested it was manufactured rather than naturally occurring. We learned that there was no scientific basis for six-foot social distancing or prolonged school closures.

By not sharing what he knew or strongly suspected in those early days, the nation lost the opportunity to course-correct. Physicians and scientists who questioned prevailing assumptions were dismissed, deplatformed, threatened and harassed for raising concerns that later proved to be legitimate subjects of debate. Fauci and his colleagues came to embody a government monopoly on truth; at one point, he even declared that attacks on him were attacks on science itself. While they knew or suspected one thing, they told the American people another.

Ordinary mistakes can arise from imperfect judgment or human weakness. Betrayal, however, corrodes the bonds of trust that hold a society together. We are left weaker and more fragile in the wake of these events, slower to trust, left to our own doubts and reflections. A nation that cannot take the scales firmly in hand and honestly examine how it performed during its last great crisis is poorly positioned to confront whatever crisis comes next.

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[Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.]

For a generation now, Americans have been told the same two words about every single vaccine: safe and effective. Safe and effective. Say it enough times and it stops sounding like a claim and starts sounding like a fact. And we’ve been told something else too — that it’s perfectly reasonable for the companies making these products to have absolute liability protection. If one of their products injures your child, you have nowhere to turn, no recourse and no one to hold accountable.

We in the MAHA movement know that isn’t right. No product should be granted liability protection by our government. A vaccine is just a product. Like any other product, it has to be tested, and retested, and retested again. And when a product harms somebody, the people it harms deserve recourse. That’s not radical. That’s not anti-anything. That is the most basic principle of a fair and honest society. Vaccines were described as “unavoidably unsafe” in Congressional hearings, and later in arguments before the Supreme Court. Those are their words, not mine. And for the first time in my lifetime, we finally have a president and an HHS Secretary willing to take that seriously — willing to do the hard research, ask the questions nobody in power would ask before, and follow the evidence wherever it leads. Because only when we have honest science can we give Americans what they’ve been denied for decades: true informed consent, and safer vaccination practices built on real data instead of marketing slogans.

As all of you know, Dr. Anthony Fauci used to say that he represented science. He actually said that — “I am the science.”

But I’ll tell you who really represents science. It’s Dr. Rand Paul. Senator and Dr. Rand Paul represents science, because he’s curious. Because he questions authority. Because he understands that science is never settled, and that the moment you declare it settled, you’ve stopped doing science altogether. He’s willing to follow the evidence wherever it takes him — and that is exactly what a real scientist does. It’s what a real doctor does. And it’s what we should demand from every single official who claims to serve the public.

This week, Senator Paul showed us what real science and real leadership look like — that dogged, bulldog determination to get to the truth and to let the American people hear it. He released more than a thousand pages of Anthony Fauci’s own diaries. And even though the corruption of the past — a preemptive pardon handed out on Biden’s way out the door — may keep Dr. Fauci from being prosecuted for things I believe are crimes against humanity, the truth is finally coming out. In his own words. And once the American people can see the truth, there’s no putting it back in the box.

And here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about. The president has asked Secretary Kennedy to take a serious, honest look at the possible link between vaccines and autism. A straightforward thing — study it, follow the data. And the reaction from the media was immediate. Dana Bash went on the air and said, in effect, that this has already been studied, the matter is closed, the science is settled. And there it is again. That phrase. “The science is settled.”

Let me say this as plainly as I know how. The science is never settled. It wasn’t settled on thalidomide. It wasn’t settled on opioids. It wasn’t settled on a hundred things the experts once swore were safe. The single most anti-scientific sentence in the English language is “the science is settled,” because the entire history of science is the story of settled ideas being overturned by people brave enough to question the status quo. Parents have been reporting what they’ve seen with their own children for years, and they deserve to have their concerns taken seriously — not waved away by a cable news anchor. If the answer is really so obvious, then a rigorous, transparent study will simply confirm it, and no honest scientist should ever be afraid of that. The only people afraid of the research are the people who don’t like where it might lead.

Trust has been breached and broken between big pharma companies, the government, and the American people. We were lied to and propagandized at scale. Those brave enough to question, those who stood up and refused to obey – refused to be told what to do, what to think, what to read or what to put into their bodies – were vilified, shunned, ostracized, censored, deplatformed. They lost their jobs, their licenses, and their reputations. They were accused of disseminating misinformation, being anti-vaxxers or conspiracy theorists. And millions of people suffered some level of vaccine injury. Dr. Fauci controlled the COVID countermeasures and gloated publicly and in his diary about his power.

After dark historical moments like this, people need truth and reconciliation, and they also need compensation. Investigating Fauci, holding him in contempt for refusing to answer reasonable questions, and eventually prosecuting him for crimes against humanity, will help rebuild trust. Compensating people who lost their livelihoods or suffered vaccine injury will also go a long way toward rebuilding that trust. In Japan, 87% of the vaccine injured receive compensation. In Thailand, 82% are compensated. Even in Canada, 22% are compensated. In the United States, fewer than 1% receive any compensation. That doesn’t inspire confidence or encourage trust.

That’s what today’s Media Hub is about. We’ll be joined by doctors, lawyers, scientists, journalists, activists, and legislators — people who have been at the forefront of exposing the potential harms of vaccines and fighting for informed consent and medical freedom, often at enormous personal cost.

You’ll hear from Del Bigtree, CEO of the Informed Consent Action Network. Mary Holland, J.D., CEO of Children’s Health Defense. Stefanie Spear, Principal Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Counselor to Secretary Kennedy. Mark Gorton, President of the MAHA Institute. Dr. Brian Hooker, Chief Scientific Officer at Children’s Health Defense. Physician and author Dr. Jeff Barke. Pediatrician and author Dr. Liz Mumper. Epidemiologist Nic Hulscher. And Senator and Dr. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the man who led the charge this week and who has been relentless in pursuing the truth about Anthony Fauci, gain-of-function research, and holding the powerful accountable under oath.

But first, we’re joined by Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona. He isn’t just talking about these ideas — he’s building them into the agenda of his campaign for Governor of Arizona. His plans to Make Arizona Healthy Again include: ending medical mandates and protecting vaccine freedom, making sure parents actually get the information they need about immunization exemptions so they can choose what’s right for their own child, banning dangerous gain-of-function research in his state, getting soda and junk food out of SNAP purchases, bringing nutrition education into medical schools, and standing up a Make Arizona Healthy Again advisory council to carry it all forward. This is exactly what it looks like when the movement moves from ideas into government policy and law. Congressman Biggs, welcome to the MAHA Media Hub.

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Dr. McAllister is a widely respected thought leader, author, podcast host, and endurance athlete whose work centers on whole-being care. She has completed the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon and twice swum the waters surrounding Alcatraz, accomplishments that reflect the courage and strength to exceed perceived limits.

In conversation, she is magnetic and deeply engaging, pairing that vibrant energy with a reflective wisdom that moves beyond symptoms into larger questions of identity, purpose, and how we choose to live. Shaped by her own health journey and decades of experience across healthcare settings, Adjusted Reality distills that vision into seven pillars: investment, replenishment, nourishment, movement, adjustment, contentment, and revitalizement, which became the foundation of our conversation.

McAllister’s health journey begins at 19, when she was injured in a serious car accident. Months of pain, medications, referrals, and uncertainty followed.

“I did not know I was even taking an opiate,” she told me.

The medication made her sick, so she stopped it, but not everyone is that fortunate. Studies suggest that roughly 5% to 6% of previously opioid-naïve patients – in other words, people with little to no experience taking opioids – continue using opioid pain medications for months after an initial prescription or surgery. In a study of more than 1 million opioid-naïve surgical patients, both repeated refills and longer treatment were independently associated with higher rates of documented opioid misuse: 44% for each additional refill and about 20% for each additional week of prescribed use.

Persistent use is not the same as addiction, but longer use creates more opportunity for dependence, misuse, and opioid use disorder – a clinical term which refers to compulsive opioid use and also the inability to stop using despite negative impacts.

What stayed with McAllister most, however, was the loss of hope: no one could explain what was wrong until a classmate handed her a chiropractor’s card.

That experience redirected her life and inspired a question she returns to throughout her book, Adjusted Reality: Why are conservative options so often treated as a last resort instead of a first consideration? McAllister calls for a shift from “last hope” to “first hope,” offering patients conservative, whole-being options earlier, rather than waiting until medications, referrals, and fragmented care have left them discouraged and out of answers.

“I don’t want anyone else to spend their life wondering why the last option isn’t the first,” she writes.

From “Nowhere” to “Now Here”

McAllister calls her approach “whole-being” care. During our conversation, she explained that the phrase describes both who we are – body, mind, purpose, and spirit – and what we do each day.

“Health is not merely something we possess,” she said. “It’s something we practice.”

That distinction stayed with me. In functional medicine, we often talk about root causes and the whole person. McAllister adds another layer: being fully present in one’s own health.

She uses the phrase “from nowhere to now here” to describe the shift from feeling lost and disempowered to actively participating in one’s own care.

Seven Pillars, One Connected Life

‘Investment,’ McAllister said, is really about intention.

“The deposits we put in today are going to show up later.”

This is not about finances but whether daily choices are building the future we want or quietly depleting it.

‘Replenishment’ begins with sleep, when the body’s “internal pharmacy” carries out essential repair and restoration. McAllister put it memorably: “You do better for your cell phone than you do for yourself.” We faithfully plug in our devices each night to charge, yet often treat getting 7-9 hours of sleep as a “luxury.” The resulting sleep debt leaves the brain, hormones, immune system, and nervous system without the time needed to recover.

During our conversation, McAllister referenced Socrates—“Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty”—which captures the point beautifully: without adequate sleep, the body becomes biologically depleted, no matter how full life may appear.

‘Nourishment’ begins even farther upstream: in the soil. McAllister shared the story of tasting freshly harvested organic mountain spinach for the first time. “My mouth sparkled,” she said. The moment captured more than the pleasure of eating something fresh and flavorful; it illustrated how different food can taste when it is grown in healthy soil and reaches our plates close to its natural state. Her larger point was that food is not simply fuel; it is information, and its quality matters. What we eat sends signals that can influence metabolism, inflammation, energy and overall health. Nourishment therefore begins long before food reaches the plate, and farmers, manufacturers, policymakers and consumers all share responsibility for moving the food system away from ultra-processed products, excess sugar and artificial ingredients and toward food that genuinely supports health.

‘Movement’ is built on stability, flexibility, mobility and capability, or strength.

“This is a four-leg stool, not a three-leg stool,” she said.

Strength matters, but strength without balance, mobility or flexibility can still leave a person vulnerable to injury, falls and loss of independence.

‘Adjustment’ is the pillar most closely associated with chiropractic care, but McAllister sees it as more than pain relief or the familiar “crack.” She connects joint function with proprioception or knowing where the body is in space; sensory-motor integration or the brain’s ability to use sensory information to coordinate movement; balance and posture; and neuroplasticity or the brain’s ability to adapt and reorganize itself over time.

‘Contentment’ may be the most unexpected pillar.

She sees grief, anxiety, loneliness, purpose and community as inseparable from physical health.

“Contentment is why we’re on Earth,” she told me.

McAllister emphasized that emotions are not separate from physical health; they can be a powerful part of both illness and healing. Yet our current health care system often focuses on the symptom, such as pain, poor sleep or delayed recovery, without asking what may be driving it, particularly when the underlying factors are emotional. The connection is substantial: a 2025 meta-analysis of 376 studies involving more than 347,000 adults with chronic pain found clinically significant symptoms of depression in 39.3% and anxiety in 40.2% of participants. Chiropractors can help recognize when emotional distress may be contributing to a patient’s symptoms and, as part of an interdisciplinary care team, communicate those concerns and refer patients to appropriately trained mental-health professionals.

‘Revitalizement’ brings everything together.

The goal, McAllister explained, is not to recharge just enough to return to the same depleted way of living. It is to become “supercharged,” restored enough to show up with greater energy, clarity and purpose in the places that matter most. In that state, health becomes more than the absence of symptoms; it becomes the capacity to be fully present with family, contribute meaningfully at work, pursue a sense of purpose and participate in community.

The Policy Question

By the end of our conversation, the subject had moved naturally from personal health to public policy.

“Collaborative care is not a trend, and it’s not a buzzword,” McAllister said. “It literally has to be the evolution of healthcare.”

A bipartisan bill introduced last year in the House and Senate would expand the services Medicare can reimburse chiropractors for providing. Medicare currently pays chiropractors only for spinal manipulation, even though it may cover services such as examinations or therapeutic exercise when they are provided by other qualified professionals. The bill would allow chiropractors to receive payment for those same Medicare-covered services when they are licensed to provide them under state law. Supporters say the change could give older adults broader access to non-drug care for back, neck and other musculoskeletal conditions.

McAllister envisions chiropractors working alongside physicians, pharmacists, physical therapists, nutrition professionals and mental-health clinicians, each contributing distinct expertise while keeping the patient—not the profession—at the center.

“The patient has choices,” she said.

A better system would make those choices easier to understand, coordinate care across disciplines and offer conservative, non-drug options earlier when clinically appropriate. In that model, chiropractic care is not a last stop after patients have exhausted every other avenue, but an integrated part of a collaborative care team that helps patients move toward healing with greater clarity, support and hope.

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That breakthrough, recounted by J.B. Handley in the foreword to The Spellers Guidebook: Practical Advice for Parents and Students, is the living proof of Dawnmarie Gaivin and Dana Johnson’s central claim: many nonspeaking or minimally speaking autistic people are not cognitively impaired. They are motor-impaired in ways that have been catastrophically misread for decades.

In their clear, practical manual, the authors give parents and clinicians the tools to correct that misreading and unlock what was always there.

Gaivin, mother of two nonspeaking sons and a key voice in the documentary Spellers, writes with the hard-won clarity of someone who has lived the before and after. Johnson, an occupational therapist, brings clinical precision to the same territory. Together they treat the reader as an intelligent adult who has probably tried everything else and is running out of hope. Their tone is never salesy. It is direct, occasionally wry, and deeply respectful of how frightening it feels to stake everything on one more approach – an approach legacy media tries to discredit at every turn.

The argument is straightforward once the distinction is made. Apraxia — trouble with intentional motor planning — is not intellectual disability. Standardized tests that demand pointing, speaking, or writing on command have measured motor output, not thinking. Once that distinction lands, the work shifts from “teaching the child to understand” to “teaching the body to show what it already knows.” The Spellers Method lowers the motor load: large three-inch letters on a vertical board, shoulder-and-arm pointing instead of fine-motor speech muscles or tiny keys, and steady rhythmic coaching until the sequence becomes automatic.

What sets the book apart is how thoroughly it prepares parents for the daily reality of coaching. Chapters on sensory-motor profiles turn theory into tactics. Some children need to touch or lick everything because their bodies crave input. Others seek deep pressure or crash into furniture to regulate. Still others bolt or grab because their nervous systems are flooded. The authors explain why a child who seems to be “escaping” a lesson may actually be protecting an overloaded auditory system by moving to the hallway — and why the lesson should continue anyway.

Regulation receives the same rigorous, usable treatment. Drawing on polyvagal theory, the authors distinguish bottom-up strategies (rhythm, deep pressure, intentional movement warm-ups) from top-down ones (age-appropriate academic content, even college lectures through headphones). They are blunt about the emotional labor required of the communication partner: slow your own voice and movements when arousal spikes, finish the last word of the lesson even when the body is melting down, stop comparing one child’s pace to another’s. These are not inspirational slogans. They are field-tested instructions for staying steady while your child learns to stay steady.

The authors are also candid about the real costs — daily practice, practitioner support, reorganized family priorities — and about the skepticism many parents will meet from professionals still attached to older models. A short chapter for “the agnostics” walks through the history of misdiagnosis without defensiveness. The most moving passages belong to the fluent spellers themselves, who describe spelling as freedom from a “silent prison” and urge younger nonspeakers to keep going.

The Spellers Guidebook does not promise instant transformation. It offers a disciplined, repeatable process for giving a child back their own voice, one letter at a time. For families who have felt they had nowhere left to turn, this may be the most important book they read this year.

Finally, this is the kind of book that parents will press into one another’s hands with the fierce hope of those who have finally found a roadmap through treacherous terrain. It deserves the widest possible audience.

[The Spellers Guidebook: Practical Advice for Parents and Students, written by Dawnmarie Gaivin and Dana Johnson, with a foreword by J. B. Handley (Skyhorse Publishing), can be ordered on Amazon]

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Barrett represents Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, which includes the state capital of Lansing and also East Lansing, the home of Michigan State University. He’s a freshman congressman who flipped the district from blue to red in 2024. He’s also a champion of medical liberty and has been endorsed by MAHA Action, the MAHA movement’s advocacy and activism 501c4.

As a state senator during the Covid pandemic, Barrett fought Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on lockdowns. In Congress, he’s emerged as one of MAHA’s biggest supporters, recently introducing a package of bills to improve food quality and infant formula, and push for more recess in public schools nationwide.

On Tuesday night, the two moderates running in the Democrat primary – a former Navy Seal named Matt Maasdam and the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink – split the vote, as predicted. This enabled the far Left candidate, William Lawrence, to win. .

Lawrence is a supporter of the Green New Deal and universal healthcare, and a founder of the Michigan Rent is Too Damn High Coalition. He’s also one of the founders of the Sunrise Movement, which opposes fossil fuels and helped elect Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to Congress.

Michigan’s 7th District is rural and conservative outside of its two larger cities – Lansing and East Lansing. It’s one of the few districts in the country that is considered a true “toss-up” district – and is expected to be a top target of Democrats in their drive to regain control of Congress in November.

Some Michigan Republicans who know Barrett don’t think he’ll have a hard time pulling out a win in November.

“Regardless of Tom’s opponent, I think he will win by a better margin than he did his first term,” 7th District Michigan Republican Party Chair Dan Schifko told The MAHA Report on Tuesday.

Schifko says Barrett was one of the top two conservatives in the Michigan Senate and that he’d encouraged him to run for Congress the first time he met him.

Barrett was hesitant, saying he had a young family and wanted to raise his kids in Michigan. But he ultimately got into the race in 2022, running against Democrat Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst. It was the most expensive House race that year, and Barrett came out with 46.5 percent of the vote to Slotkin’s 51.5 percent. When Slotkin ran for the Senate in 2024, Barrett ran for the House seat again and won.

Barrett served in the Michigan state Senate during the Covid pandemic and was one of the most vocal Republicans opposing Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s draconian lockdown policies, which famously included telling Michigan residents in April of 2020 that they were not allowed to go to their vacation homes in other parts of the state.

In a July 2020 radio interview, Barrett blasted Whitmer, saying she had no right to use emergency powers she’d claimed early in the pandemic. He added that it was necessary to “restore the constitutionally guaranteed form of government in Michigan,” which gives every person “the right to representative democracy.”

Barrett helped promote a petition drive called “Unlock Michigan” – to repeal a 1945 state law that Whitmer cited, claiming that it allowed her to continue using emergency powers indefinitely, essentially usurping the role of the state legislature.

“He learned facts and he had a level head throughout the whole thing,” said Schifko, remembering Barrett’s advocacy during that time.

Barrett, now age 45, served in the U.S. Army for 22 years, which included tours of duty as a helicopter pilot in Iraq and Afghanistan. After the Army, and prior to running for state legislature, he served as an analyst with his state’s Department of the Treasury.

The package of MAHA bills Barrett recently introduced in the House of Representatives includes one that expands tax-free, health savings accounts (HSAs) and would allow people to use their HSAs to pay for nutritious food, vitamins and gym memberships.

Another is a MAHA-friendly bill to study how screen time and video-game playing may be affecting the mental health and well-being of boys and young men.

Barrett also introduced the Safe Baby Formula Act to ban toxic metals in baby formula and require the FDA to study the effects of heavy metals in formula.

Three other MAHA-friendly bills Barrett introduced aimed to make sure our troops and public schoolchildren have healthy food. The Healthy Commissaries, Healthy Families Act would require the Department of Defense to team up with local farmers and bring more healthy food into military commissaries – the grocery stores on military bases. The Know What’s on the Tray Act would require schools to publish information on their websites about every item on the school menu. And the Healthy Recess for Learning Act would encourage elementary and middle schools to expand recess to at least 60 minutes a day.

As the dust settles on Tuesday night’s Democratic primary results, MAHA Action president, Tony Lyons, reflected on why it’s so important for Barrett and other MAHA-endorsed candidates to win in November: “The Democrats stifle debate, which makes them anti-science,” he said.

Lyons added, “They say they want to protect individual freedom and rights, but deep down they want to control everything—what you do, what you think, what you put into your body and what you read. That’s why the midterms are existential. They are a battle between personal freedom and communism.”

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As if readers didn’t already know which side the Times often takes when it ‘reports’ political news, the so-called ‘paper of record’ has once again reported what looks like a news piece but reads like an editorial.

At the Wall Street Journal, former news department editor-in-chief Matt Murray describes what a news story should offer: “Sound news reporting is based in facts, impartially gathered and fearlessly presented,” he writes. “It relies on objective, baseline truths that are knowable. Great reporters are curious, skeptical, challenging, open, empathetic and genuinely impartial—and go where the facts lead.”

Paul Gigot, who oversees the Opinion pages at the WSJ, clearly lays out what he looks for in editorials: “Wall Street Journal readers want information, but they also want to make their own judgments about what they are learning,” writes Gigot. “Our commentary is intended to inform on the issues of the day, with the added purpose of stirring debate and helping readers decide for themselves what they think.”

Writers at the Times, the WSJ and many other news organizations presumably have been taught this basic distinction in journalism school or wherever they began writing professionally.

Turning reporting into editorial journalism may well be a consequence of the politically divisive times in which we live.

The Times’ coverage of The MAHA Report story, dated July 30 and titled, “Book Sales for the ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ Spike Following the Fauci Hearing,” written by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, is its most recent case in point.

Our article was based on the fact that the Skyhorse book, The Real Anthony Fauci, went from out of Amazon’s top one hundred books in the nation, to, the day after the Fauci hearing, #69, #52, and, after the story was published, #42.

These facts are unimpeachable.

The Times article about our report gives only the smallest red flag: “Spotlight on Fauci Said to Boost Books Sales for Kennedy and His Publisher.”

The “Said” is valid; the Times isn’t suggesting it knows more than our report. It is signaling that it’s simply reporting on our report.

But is it – and if not, where does it go off the rails?

The article starts innocently enough. “Mr. Kennedy’s mini book tour came as Republicans accused Dr. Fauci of enriching himself by enriching staff and colleagues to enter contests with cash awards, including a $1 million prize that government ethics officials allowed him to keep.”

But now comes the “but”:

“But Mr. Kennedy,” writes Stolberg, who covers the intersection of health policy and politics, “Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who chaired the hearing; even Mr. Kennedy’s son Robert F. Kennedy III have all published critical books about Mr. Fauci whose sales may have gotten a boost from the negative public attention the men have helped generate against him.”

The three books in question, all published by Skyhorse Publishing, are Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci; Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up; and Kennedy III’s fictional, The Confessions of Anthony Fauci.

Noting that RFK Jr. and Paul have promoted their books while holding public office, Stolberg goes after both by revealing what they’ve been paid and reaching out to ethics experts about a potential conflict of interest.

“Ethics experts say that Mr. Kennedy, his son and Mr. Paul did not cross any legal or ethical lines,” Stolberg writes, “but several said the secretary and the senator did cross a threshold for hypocrisy by using their platforms to sell books about Dr. Fauci while accusing the scientist of profiting from his own public service.”

Stolberg quotes Kathleen Clark, an expert in government ethics and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Clark tells her that public officials using their respective platforms to promote books “may not be a legal conflict, but it is a conflict, and it may help explain their actual motivations.”

Stolberg also goes after Skyhorse and MAHA Action president, Tony Lyons, on the ethics of selling books while running a political action committee (MAHA Action, Inc.). She quotes Lyons fairly, but again wants to show how he and his authors are hypocritical; in her view, they’re doing the same thing they’re accusing Fauci of doing. Profiting personally while either holding public office or, in Lyons’ case, running a PAC.

Even if Stolberg is correct and Lyons and his authors are guilty of being hypercritical, that doesn’t make them wrong about Fauci. Nor does that make the article’s larger project any less certain: to defend Fauci while exposing some of his enemies.

In case there’s any doubt in Times’ readers minds as to what her point of view might be, here’s how Stolberg ends her article:

“In a diary he kept on his government computer, which Mr. Paul released publicly,” writes Stolberg, “Dr. Fauci wrote that he had mentioned Mr. Kennedy’s book to a lawyer, Don Walker, before its publication, saying it would undoubtedly be “a very scandalous.” Mr. Walker, he said, “was adamant that we [sic] should do nothing about this since Bobby Kennedy has absolutely no credibility.”

And the kicker?

“That was five years ago, long before anyone envisioned Mr. Kennedy would become secretary,” Stolberg writes.

In other words, we’re in scary times, my friends. Mr. Kennedy is not only unhinged but he’s in charge. We need more Anthony Fauci’s of the world, not fewer.

Does Stolberg’s ending, building on what came before it, sound “open, empathetic, and genuinely impartial”?

Not to this reader.

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On July 29, the embodiment of science itself, Dr. Anthony Fauci, invoked the Fifth Amendment over 100 times as he was shredded by Republican Senators for Covid-era lies that were once promulgated as absolute truth by traditional media outlets.

Days before, Fauci’s diary was posted publicly in Senator Rand Paul’s Reading Room, exposing the stark differences between his public statements and his private thoughts, which he stupidly placed on a government-owned computer. A running theme in Fauci’s diary was his addiction to the media adoration he received.

Fauci bathed in his celebrity status, luxuriating in the attention as though it were a scented bubble bath.

Fauci’s statements became policies because the media went along with every word he uttered – even when they contradicted previous statements. What Fauci said became the official narrative.

But the dam began to break.

The MAHA Report helped spread the news that Stephen A. Smith had publicly apologized to basketball star Kyrie Irving for criticizing him for not taking the Covid vaccine.

The Fauci hearing triggered an explosion of outrage that has been simmering for years – outrage about the damage caused by the Covid lockdowns, non-scientific social distancing recommendations, masking orders, vaccine mandates, and Covid vaccine injuries.

And on Sunday, Dr. Ashish Jha, the man who replaced Fauci as President Biden’s Covid Czar, said he now believes that the Covid virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – publicly disagreeing with Fauci’s claim that the virus jumped to humans from animals.

But where are more journalists questioning what they were told in the heat of the Covid battle? Thomas Jefferson famously believed in a free press as a safeguard to keep the government in check.

During the pandemic, legacy journalists lost their way; they forgot the vital role they must play to keep a democracy healthy. Ask tough questions? Question authority? Little of it.

Unfortunately, today many of the same journalists who refused to question Fauci, and other voices spreading his gospel, are still confused about their profession.

Enter CNN’s Dana Bash, host of “State of the Union,” whose staff made the decision to book Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, onto its Sunday, August 2 broadcast.

Perhaps the thinking was that Bash would spend her twenty plus minute segment attacking Kennedy with the usual talking points on his ‘anti-vax’ crusades, his ‘spreading conspiracy theories.’

Perhaps the idea was to take the most visible figure of the medical freedom movement and use him as a scapegoat, a patsy, to put the anti-official narrative – about the origins of the pandemic, vaccines, and more – back into an impenetrable box, a safe place where journalists don’t have to do the real work their profession requires.

Whatever the motivation, things did not go as planned.

Bash, with no hard facts to back her up, tried to land a punch on Kennedy, who barraged her with facts.

Dana got bashed.

For the dying official Covid narrative, and for CNN, the interview was a disaster.

Bash attempted to shift the blame for failed Covid policies from Fauci to President Trump. Kennedy explained that Trump wanted to open the country back up but Fauci’s public statements – trumpeted by the legacy media – influenced many governors to keep lockdowns in place.

Kennedy also noted Covid policies continued for eighteen months into the Biden administration.

Bash asked what Kennedy would do differently when the next pandemic occurs.

“Listen to the doctors on the front lines,” he said, explaining that there were therapeutics that were working but doctors who were saving lives were shut down. “We weren’t listening to them,” he said. “We were doing the opposite.”

If there is another pandemic, Kennedy said, “We need to protect our Constitutional rights.”

For Bash, apparently the notion of protecting people’s rights was not something that should be considered.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“We began censoring people in violation of the First Amendment,” Kennedy responded. Bash went on: “You’re talking about rights; I’m talking about a potential public health crisis that is coming.”

For Bash and CNN, the Constitution applies only when unelected public health officials say so.

“Doctors who said, ‘you’re doing it wrong’ were marginalized and vilified,” Kennedy added.

Bash then stated, “I really want to move on.”

Kennedy dished back, “Because you were part of the problem.” He added, “It was absolute press malpractice…Your job is to maintain a fierce skepticism toward authority. And you weren’t doing that. You were beating up on people who were dissenting.”

As though she were a sales rep for a Big Pharma company, not a journalist, Bash pivoted to promoting Covid vaccines.

Kennedy cornered his opponent on the reckless Covid vaccine recommendations for children and called Bash out when she could not cite the studies she based her claims on. Bash said she spoke to ‘scientists’ and ‘experts.’

Kennedy noted that legacy media sites ‘experts’ instead of doing the research and reading the actual science.

The interview became more heated when Bash said, “The president wants you to probe the link between autism and vaccines?”

“He certainly does,” Kennedy replied.

Bash read from her prepared script printed on pretty blue paper: “Have you talked to him about medical research that has studied this for twenty-five years and found no link between vaccines and autism? And this is my question here, because I don’t want to litigate that…why not study what could cause autism which scientists believe starts with fetal brain development…why not study whether there are environmental factors that go into a predisposed genetic situation?”

Kennedy responded that studies to determine environmental causes of autism are being done. “That’s one of the ways we found the link between perinatal Tylenol use and autism onset.”

Kennedy said Bash was wrong when she asserted that the issue has been studied. “And you’re rolling your eyes, Dana,” he said.

”I am because I don’t want you to use our air to say this,” Bash answered.

Pause.

“Use our air”?

What would Jefferson say?

Perhaps: “Your attempt to suppress real debate, Dana, is a blow to democracy.”

Returning to her pretty blue script, Bash read a statement prepared by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Kennedy pointed out that the Institute of Medicine said none of the eight vaccines administered in the first 6 months of life have ever been studied for a relationship to autism.

Bash called these words “categorically untrue.”

Kennedy responded, “You’re sounding like a parrot…Trust the experts like you trusted Fauci… now you’re rolling out the experts again to talk about something that you have no personal knowledge of…You’re getting the best science from someone who is lying to you.”

It was a remarkable moment.

Bash didn’t want to debate Kennedy, she wanted to ridicule him.

It backfired.

The great Covid reckoning has begun.

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[Originally published on July 30 in The Washington Times under the title, “Medtech: A great value in American healthcare”; republished with permission from the author.]

There is a lot of talk in Washington about “value” in healthcare. Some suggest the best way to create value is to simply lower costs by limiting the procedures and products available to patients. But what this misses is the long-term value these procedures and technologies provide both to patients themselves and the healthcare system overall.

The medtech industry has a powerful story to tell here: The cost of the medical technologies, devices, and equipment that fill hospitals, clinics, and home healthcare settings has remained very steady for decades. Not only is medtech not a cost driver; it is actually a cost saver. Here’s how. The diagnostic tests, technologies, implants, wearables and digital tools developed by medtech innovators help doctors find disease earlier, treat it more precisely and manage it before a crisis requires far more expensive, invasive, and possibly even less effective treatment. Increasingly, AI-enabled medtech, for example, has the potential to extend that value.

Consider breast cancer screening. A prominent study found that AI-assisted mammography helped doctors detect 29% more breast cancer instances than radiologist review alone, without increasing false positives. It also reduced doctors’ reading workload by 44% and found 51% more in situ cancers, often described as non-invasive.

The stakes are clear. When breast cancer is found before it has spread, about 99% of patients are alive five years later. When it is found after spreading to other parts of the body, that rate falls to roughly 30%. The financial stakes move in the same direction. Early treatment can take weeks; late treatment can mean years of surgery, chemotherapy, medicines, repeat scans, emergency visits and other care. By one analysis, breast cancer treatment costs were roughly twice as high for later-stage disease as for earlier-stage disease.

Those potential savings are not abstract. They are hospital days not needed, procedures avoided, complications prevented, and costs Medicare, Medicaid, employers and families may not have to absorb. Across the roughly 288,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer each year, even a modest shift from late diagnosis to early diagnosis could save lives and reduce spending.

That same value proposition appears across many areas of healthcare, including diabetes, which cost the United States $412.9 billion in 2022. Some of the most expensive episodes are dangerous blood sugar emergencies that send patients to the emergency room or ICU. Continuous glucose monitors help patients see problems earlier and act sooner.

One large real-world study found that starting a flash glucose monitor was associated with reductions in hospitalizations for serious diabetes emergencies in both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, with the improvement lasting two years. Every avoided admission can mean fewer emergency visits, inpatient stays, and related costs.

Cardiac care tells the same story. For a patient having a heart attack, a stent can reopen a blocked artery before the heart is badly damaged. One widely cited economic analysis found that reopening blocked arteries after a heart attack adds more than a full year of life expectancy at a cost near $40,000 — a strong value by commonly used medical cost-effectiveness standards.

Outcomes keep improving: one recent analysis found that deaths within a year after emergency artery-opening procedures for the most serious heart attacks fell by roughly 30%. Without timely treatment, patients face greater risk of heart failure, repeat hospital stays, disability and higher long-term costs.

Medical technology, alongside advances in prevention, treatment and care delivery, has contributed to major public health gains. Since 1950, death rates from heart disease have fallen by roughly three-quarters. Across five major cancers, prevention and screening helped avoid 4.75 million deaths over 45 years. Another analysis estimated that cancer screening generated $6.5 trillion in value and 12 million years of life over 25 years.

This should matter to budget hawks. Medtech is a part of healthcare where competition and iterative innovation can improve products while helping hold prices in check. It accounts for less than 6% of national health spending. Since 2000, overall medical prices have risen much higher than the prices for medical equipment made by manufacturers.

Part of the reason is that medtech is fast-moving and highly competitive. Companies invest more than $20 billion each year in research and development, and improved products often reach patients every one to two years. Each new version aims to do more for patients while reducing burdens on doctors, hospitals, and payers. That value is not theoretical. It is realized every day in operating rooms, heart procedure rooms, imaging centers, clinics, and homes across America.

It is also an American strength. U.S.-made technologies supply about 70% of the domestic market, generating more than $250 billion in annual output and nearly three million direct and indirect jobs across 16,000 facilities in all 50 states. The industry exported $80 billion in 2024 — more than automobiles or semiconductors. America is a global leader in medical innovation, supporting patients, workers, and communities at home.

At the same time, the federal government is now the largest payer of the nation’s $5.3 trillion healthcare bill. As policymakers debate affordability for patients and payers, they should elevate technologies that help avoid the costliest parts of care: late diagnosis, preventable hospital stays, complications, disability and worsening disease.

Those are just the kinds of results we all want: earlier answers, earlier treatment, and better use of a strained healthcare workforce.

For the woman whose cancer is caught early, the man with diabetes who avoids the ICU, and the heart attack patient who walks out of the hospital alive, the value of medtech is concrete. By helping deliver earlier diagnoses, better outcomes, and avoided downstream costs, medtech should be a headline, never a footnote, in healthcare policy debates.

Scott Whitaker is President and CEO of AdvaMed.

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