“We’ve changed the way millions of people in this country think about food and medicine and farming and public health,” he said. “We changed the language that we use – words and phrases like ‘eat real food,’ seed oils, petroleum-based food dyes, beef tallow, ultra-processed foods and regenerative agriculture.”

But America, he said, still faces the “staggering reality” of rampant chronic disease, affecting 60 percent of the population.

“But the most hopeful truth we carry with us in this room is that 85 percent of that chronic disease is entirely preventable, and even reversible,” said Lyons. “And we have the talent, the technology, the ingenuity to become the healthiest country in the world.”

To transition from a “sick care” system to a health care system that is proactive will take a “broad coalition,” he said, “A kind of a dream team where every sector of society has a seat at the table and has a role to play in the debate, and can then also participate in the progress.”

As the Summit unfolded, and different speakers took to the retro-futuristic, frequently morphing stage at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel’s ballroom on Pennsylvania Avenue, there was agreement that the dramatic changes in public health, nutrition and agriculture that have been made since February 2025, when HHS Secretary Kennedy was sworn in, are here for good and they’ll be no turning back.

The Summit attracted roughly 1,000 attendees and was livestreamed for audiences across the country.

“Every single boardroom in America is talking about MAHA,” said Calley Means, an advisor to HHS. “Every single boardroom in America is investing significantly into better food ingredients, and is thinking about toxins. That is happening to an unbelievable degree … We have established an incredible, historic trajectory that I don’t think is going away.”

A diverse group of speakers addressed a variety of health topics. They included boxing icon Mike Tyson, who shared that his worst MAHA habit is snacking on Jolly Ranchers, and wellness and spirituality commentator Russell Brand, who moderated a panel featuring Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

A central theme was securing healthier, less expensive food for all Americans, with one late day panel, “Real Food at Scale,” featuring Scott Morris, Senior Vice President of Private Brands at Walmart, the largest grocery retailer in the world.

“I don’t think a single American shouldn’t be able to eat healthy because they can’t afford it,” Morris said during that discussion.

USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins’ appearance in a session titled “Securing America’s Food Supply & Environmental Innovation” offered a report card for the administration thus far.

The question-and-answer session with Rollins focused on the administration’s agricultural policies, including efforts to improve federal food programs while increasing agricultural production. Their discussion opened with praise for the achievements of limiting soda and junk food for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients. Secretary Rollins enthusiastically pledged to “get better food into SNAP,” then summarized rule changes requiring SNAP retailers to offer more fresh produce.

Secretary Rollins emphasized that her agency’s regenerative efforts have been “an extraordinary success.” Rollins made a huge announcement that the grant to regenerative farming grants is increased to $1 billion. She called the initiative the biggest regenerative agriculture announcement in history, stating, “We have had 15,000 grant applications. Fifteen thousand of our farmers have been approved for these grants for regenerative agriculture.”

The school lunch program, Rollins said, represents a “massive opportunity” to transition school lunches from plastic containers and reheating food from outside vendors, to feeding children real meals made from locally grown, locally sourced food that’s been cooked on site in school kitchens.

Rollins reminded the audience of the jointly announced Harvest to Hallways program that “incentivize[s] the local purchasing of healthy food grown right next to our schools for our school lunches.”

In her effort to support domestic farmers and ranchers and source more school lunch, SNAP, and other foods from local regenerative producers, Rollins credited Secretary Kennedy for raising public awareness. She also warned that the fight to reverse decades of poor policy will not be won overnight.

“The swamp, the status quo, will always be a challenge, but we must keep running toward the goal…,” she said. “And I think Secretary Kennedy has done that as well as anyone perhaps in our lifetimes. It’s my honor to partner with him in that important effort, and I think we’re going to continue to see some real wins.”

During his panel, Calley Means was seated on the stage with Kyle Diamantas, the acting commissioner of the FDA, Lee Zeldin, Secretary of the EPA and Tony Lyons as moderator.

“We were with Secretary Kennedy last night,” said Diamantas. “And one of the things he said is that if he got hit by a bus tomorrow, HHS would never go back to the way it was before. And that’s fundamentally true.”

As evidence of lasting changes, Diamantas pointed to HHS closing the GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) loophole to require that companies notify the FDA when introducing a new ingredient or chemical into the food supply. He also said that for the first time in history, the FDA is setting up a process to review problematic ingredients that are already in American food.

The agency has also introduced a federal regulation that will allow the government to compile a list of ingredients found in food, something most Americans would likely be astonished to know does not yet exist.

Means talked about the other revolutionary changes at HHS in just the last year and a half: The new food pyramid that puts protein at the top; the removal of harmful food dyes; HHS working with 40 states to ban cell phones in schools; and HHS coordination with 30 states to ban soda and candy from SNAP.

“We are on a 10-year journey to really marshal a grand conversation about what the future of healthcare looks like, what the future of food looks like,” said Means.

He said that as secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pushing for transparency.

“He wants the truth to get out,” he said.

One of Kennedy’s closest advisors, Stefanie Spear, moderated the late afternoon panel, “Real Food at Scale” – featuring Jonathan Neman, the founder and CEO of SweetGreen; Morris, the Wal-Mart executive; and Michael Boes, the chief MAHA officer at Steak ’n Shake, who has guided the burger chain’s transition from seed oils to beef tallow (to cook french fries) and to grassfed beef for its burgers.

“These policies are going to stick. MAHA is here to stay,” said Spear. “And I think companies see that now. I think that’s why we have more than 50 percent of companies doing all these voluntary commitments and taking dyes out of their food…I think that’s something we can all be proud of and it’s going to definitely help make America healthy again.”

Before Cheryl Hines introduced her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Vice President J.D. Vance, she announced seven full-day MAHA Symposiums scheduled over the next 12 months, another sign that MAHA is here to stay.

Then, with impeccable comic timing, she said, “And now I’d like to introduce two guys you’ve never heard of…”

The audience laughed and applauded as Kennedy and Vance took the stage.

As some of the speakers had before him, Kennedy addressed the issue of AI, or Superintelligence, and how it will change healthcare.

HHS has done more than any other agency to drive demand for Superintelligence, he said, referring to the “tremendous potential” of AI to help solve problems in healthcare.

By 2029, he said, Americans will have access to their medical records on their cell phones. But it goes much deeper than just efficiency.

“One of the things that is going to change is that we’re never, ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us, ‘Trust the experts,’” Kennedy said.

He continued, “Every American will be able to check their own medical advice. They’ll also be able to check the advice of public officials. And if somebody tells you, ‘Masks work. Trust the experts,’ AI may tell you otherwise. If somebody tells you, ‘Social distancing works, trust the experts,’ AI may correct that. And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection and you need to take it to protect your grandmother, AI may tell you, ‘It actually doesn’t do that.’”

[You can watch the full MAHA Summit, here].

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He laments that today most of these fields are empty and overgrown – a sad reflection of what once was.

Intrusive government regulations, consolidation, over-grazing, and a new generation less interested in agriculture have led to the decline in independent farms and, in turn, contributed to a smaller cattle herd size.

Over the past five decades, consolidation has been dramatic. In the 1970s, the top four meat packers controlled around 36% of the market. Today, four companies control about 85% of the market, giving them much greater control, and a bigger cut of the price that consumers pay.

As of January 1, 2026, the U.S. cattle herd stood at 86.2 million head, the smallest number since 1951. It was at 92 million head in 2016 and nearly 96.7 million in 2006.

This has tightened the supply of beef in the United States and contributed to record or near-record high beef prices in grocery stores – and anxiety about a declining American standard of living.

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the retail price of ground beef as of August was $6.92 per pound, compared to $3.87 in February of 2020, right before the Covid pandemic. This represents an increase of 79% in just six-and-a-half years.

“We need to find some way to increase the number of people farming, raising cows,” Simmons said. “If we’re going to have whole food instead of ultra processed and processed food, we’ve got to be able to raise beef and pork.”

He added, “Unlike the advice in the song, more parents should encourage their kids to grow up to be cowboys.”

What’s the reason for the drop in the number of cattle, and beef cattle in particular?

Farmers describe it as a perfect storm of drought, pestilence and aging cattle farmers who are selling their herds, with few young people willing to take their place.

The average cattle farm owner is now 65 years old, five years older than the average crop farmer, says Joel Salatin, the Virginia farmer known as the pioneer of regenerative agriculture.

“Old farmers don’t want to expand at any price; they’re done and there is not enough young people coming in,” he told The MAHA Report. “It’s hard to attract young people to an unprofitable business.”

Simmons owns and operates Nature’s Gourmet Farm. He raises beef, chicken, and pork with the objective of providing healthy meat to consumers and sharing the farm’s journey with younger generations to “cultivate an interest in regenerative farming. Simmons has a USDA processing facility.

Last October, he walked into his local co-op and asked to buy more ryegrass to plant his winter pastures.

“The manager told me that it will be cheaper than last year, and if I placed my order and paid him now, it would be even less expensive,” Simmons told The MAHA Report.

“He said all of the old cattle guys here have sold the cows, and they’re not going to replace them because the price was so high,” Simmons added. “Farmers never really got a lot of money for their cows, and the price of the cows even today has not kept up with the price of inflation and input costs.”

The nonprofit advocacy group Farm Action reports that farmers’ and ranchers’ share of the retail beef dollar went from more than 60% in the 1970s to about 35% today, even as consumers are paying more.

“While surviving ranchers are finally receiving a healthier share of the retail beef dollar, that recovery is fragile,” the organization said in a recent report.

Salatin, the owner of Polyface Farm, told The MAHA Report that a widespread drought in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021 led to a massive herd sell-off when grass was limited. And then during Covid, he says, beef and milk processors “couldn’t keep up with their normal volume, so milk cows were culled and sold into the ground beef market, further depressing prices.”

Land deterioration has also impacted cattle herd size, Salatin believes.

“American pastures have been overgrazed due to improper continuous grazing protocols. As a result, pastures are in worse shape today than they were a century ago. Many acres that ran cattle as part of a diversified, integrated enterprise are now solely crop oriented,” he explained.

Rising costs are one of the culprits.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, beef prices have escalated significantly faster than food prices as a whole over the last five years.

These increased costs have forced operators to get loans to buy cattle or fund infrastructure improvements.

Will Harris, 71, is a fourth generation farmer who operates White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. For three generations, the Harris family farmed White Oak Pastures the conventional way, relying heavily on chemicals, pesticides, and antibiotics. In the mid-1990s, Harris started the transition to regenerative methods, which prioritize building and preserving healthy soils, avoiding synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and minimal or no tilling.

Harris is also the founder of the Center for Agricultural Resilience, an organization centered on education about the benefits of regenerative farming. He’s an outspoken advocate for regenerative farming and introducing the profession to a new generation. He told The MAHA Report that many potential first-time cattle farmers are discouraged because of the costs, and that subsequently, this impacts cattle herd size.

“The gestation period of a cow is 283 days on average,” he said. A calf doesn’t become marketable until it is two years old. Nearly three years is invested getting a calf to market.”

Many cattle producers are unwilling to invest in raising new stock because of the low return, and younger people are reluctant to take over, or start a new farm, because of these factors, Harris noted.

White Oak Pastures currently has 1,000 head of calves ranging from newborns to ones ready for slaughter. Harris recognizes that White Oak Pastures would have added challenges if it was solely producing cattle.

“We took a different path. We diversified and vertically integrated. We built a USDA processing facility and an order fulfillment center. We used to only raise cattle. Now we also raise poultry, goats, hogs, sheep, and vegetables,” Harris said.

International competition has also impacted U.S. cattle herd numbers.

Record shipments of beef imports have flooded into the country in 2026 from Argentina, New Zealand and Nicaragua.

The New World screwworm’s return in the early months of summer wreaked havoc on the cattle industry.

The parasite’s resurgence spurred the Trump administration in May 2025 to block all imports of live cattle, horses and bison across the southern border with Mexico.

High feed costs have also made it more expensive for farmers to feed their cattle.

Driven largely by high prices for corn and alfalfa, feed costs have stayed elevated above $100 per hundredweight.

Simmons said that Nature’s Gourmet Farm is thriving, and sales growth continues.

“Tomorrow, we will deliver our biggest number of orders to date,” he noted.

He acknowledged that his bottom line is helped by having a USDA processing facility on site, and he has networks with grass-fed ranchers who can supply what he doesn’t have on his farm.

On Aug. 21, Trump announced that the U.S. will allow up to 300,000 metric tons (661 million pounds) of additional beef to enter the country at a lower tariff through Nov. 30, starting Sept. 1.

The new beef import plan will increase the supply of lean beef trimmings used in ground beef and help lower ground beef prices for American consumers, according to the White House directive.

Trump previously signed an executive order in February authorizing the import of 80,000 metric tons of beef from Argentina.

On Aug. 31, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the Ranchers First Initiative, which a USDA press release calls “a sweeping package of actions to continue rebuilding the Great American Beef Herd and put America’s ranchers back at the center of our nation’s food supply.”

“We are investing real dollars to rebuild the Great American Beef Herd, giving producers the risk management tools they need, cutting the red tape that has squeezed small and independent operators, and demanding transparency in a marketplace that has been consolidated and foreign-owned for far too long,” Rollins said.

Congress is also attempting to address the cattle herd problem. U.S. Senators Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) introduced the Rebuilding America’s National Cow Herd (RANCH) Act.

The proposed legislation would establish a new voluntary grazing land restoration program that would open up to 20 million new acres for grazing.

At 20 million acres, the program created by the RANCH Act would provide grazing land to support an estimated two to four million additional beef cows, according to a press release issued by Senator Rounds.

No grass means no cattle, and the challenges ranchers have faced with drought, high input costs, and a shortage of grazing land have contributed to the small cattle herd size, Rounds said.

“In the long-term, this plan can rebuild the domestic cattle herd and help drive down beef costs,” Klobuchar added.

Multiple ranchers told The MAHA Report they would like to see the PRIME Act passed.

Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) first introduced the Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption Act—the PRIME Act—in 2015.

Different versions have been introduced since then.

The measure is designed to give states more freedom to permit meat processed through qualifying custom slaughter facilities and be sold within their own borders.

Mollie Engelhart is a regenerative farmer and the founder of Sovereignty Ranch in Bandera, Texas. She also serves as an executive chef at Eat the Barn and Farm to Table Restaurant on Sovereign Ranch and is the author of “Debunked by Nature.”

Earlier this month, she appeared on The MAHA Action Media Hub, praised Trump and Rollins for their actions to help ranchers, and urged them to do more.

“We need so many more farmers. We all know that the farmers are aging out of the system, and we cannot make America healthy again if we can’t make farming sustainable for farmers in America,” Engelhart said.

Engelhart called the nation’s food supply a national security issue and said that farmers need assistance that doesn’t saddle them with added debt.

“We can’t just give farmers access to debt without giving them access to markets. We want to give farmers the tools to grow the herd,” she said.

Register to watch the MAHA Summit live, September 29th

Register For The MAHA Summit

MAHA Center Inc., the 501(c)(3) nonprofit led by Tony Lyons, presents the one-day MAHA Summit, the flagship annual gathering of the Make America Healthy Again movement.

Organizers say this year’s program draws from a broader cross-section of industries than the first, with U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin joining a lineup of about 40 speakers. The summit website invites the public to register and watch live.

A Year of Progress

In January, Kennedy and Rollins unveiled new Dietary Guidelines for Americans that tell families to prioritize protein at every meal, choose full-fat dairy with no added sugars and limit highly processed foods, added sugars and artificial additives. One week later, President Trump signed the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act, returning whole milk to school meal programs.

The wins kept coming through the spring and summer, despite mainstream media’s persistent reluctance to cover them.

In May, Kennedy announced an action plan to curb psychiatric overprescribing, especially among children, and to require informed consent and shared decision-making. In August, HHS proposed closing the decades-old “generally recognized as safe“ (GRAS) loophole, which lets companies declare their own ingredients safe without notifying the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). HHS and USDA also sent the federal government’s first definition of ‘ultra-processed foods’ for final review.

And there’s more: According to HHS, 42 states have now passed legislation advancing the MAHA agenda, 23 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) waivers limit purchases of unhealthy items, and companies making up 40% of the U.S. food and beverage industry have committed to removing artificial dyes from their products. HHS has also redirected $1.8 billion a year to fight the childhood chronic disease epidemic.

Cabinet Officials Take the Stage

At Tuesday’s summit, Secretary Rollins will lead a session on securing the American food supply. And there will be a panel called “Recovery First,” on the science of sleep with panelists to be announced.

Also, HHS Senior Advisor Calley Means will anchor a session on modernizing the FDA, with expected speakers Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas; Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz; and Chris Klomp, nominee for HHS deputy secretary.

From the Soil to the Human Body

Another panel focuses on Real Food Scale and will feature Steak ‘n Shake Chief MAHA Officer, Michael Boes; and HHS Principal Deputy Chief of Staff/ Senior Counselor to Secretary Kennedy, Stefanie Spear.

Regenerative farmer and Iowa candidate for Governor, Zach Lahn, shares a cancer prevention panel with GRAIL CEO Dr. Josh Ofman, whose company developed the Galleri multi-cancer early detection test, along with health educator, Dr. Eric Berg.

Other panels cover affordability, longevity, direct-to-consumer care, artificial intelligence and psychedelic medicine. And for those interested in sport and fitness, former undisputed heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, UFC fighter Michael Chandler, former Major League Baseball (MLB) All-Star Noah Syndergaard and Ultimate Human host Gary Brecka will participate in the “The MAHA Athlete“ panel.

Lyons sees the summit as a titular event for the movement — both showcase and celebration.

“Imagine an America where our children are healthier than we are, where they live longer, more productive, more vibrant, more adventurous lives than we did,” he told The MAHA Report. “Imagine an America where businesses compete to provide products that result in better health outcomes, compete to deliver food without dangerous chemicals or pesticides, technological breakthroughs that improve our quality of life, where regenerative farmers grow most of our food, where we can deliver personalized medicine based on transparent, cutting edge, gold standard science.”

Lyons added, “That's the America that MAHA is fighting for. That's the America that every parent wants and every child deserves. That's the America that President Trump empowered Secretary Kennedy to build. The MAHA Summit is a celebration of the incredible progress toward that goal.”

On Tuesday, when Vance and Kennedy lay out the movement’s priorities for the year ahead, they along with Lyons and many others will help set the agenda for the next phase of the MAHA movement’s fight to reverse America’s chronic disease epidemic – for today’s children, and for generations to come.

The official press release announcing the MAHA Summit will be released on Monday, September 28 at 6:30 a.m.

Register to watch the MAHA Summit live, September 29th

Register For The MAHA Summit

Over the years, I have quietly remembered that day and the days that followed. It has taken me years to realize the lessons of 9/11. I’ve learned that the only way to work through trauma and suffering is through service to others.

Our nation’s chiropractors knew that on Day One and came to serve. What follows is a story that has not been told but should have been. The MAHA Report is proud to bring readers a story of how our nation’s chiropractors stepped up and provided care to those who worked the mound, the bucket brigade, and never stopped trying to rescue people, recover remains and restore the wound in our nation’s soul.

This is what our chiropractors did for those brave men and women.]

— Louis Conte, Health Freedom Editor

By Dr. Ellen Coyne, Former Chairman of the Board, NY Chiropractic Council

There are certain moments in life that divide everything into “before” and “after.”

September 11, 2001, is one of those moments.

I remember that day with extraordinary clarity. I was Chairman of the Board of the New York Chiropractic Council when the attacks on New York City took place. Like millions of other people, I watched in disbelief as our city—and our country—was forever changed.

But something else happened that day, too.

Almost immediately, the telephone at the New York Chiropractic Council began ringing.

Chiropractors from all over the United States—and eventually from around the world—were calling us.

“What are you doing to help?”

“How can we help?”

Those calls were the beginning of an extraordinary chapter in my life and, I believe, one of the finest demonstrations of the heart and spirit of the chiropractic profession.

The Calls Began

We knew we had to do something.

We began organizing almost immediately. We needed equipment and supplies, and the chiropractic community responded. Harvey Supply, a local vendor that had always been a tremendous supporter of chiropractic, donated adjusting tables, headrest paper, and other supplies.

We established five respite centers in the area around Ground Zero.

Then we started putting together schedules.

The goal was simple: someone would always be there.

Chiropractors worked around the clock, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And that effort continued for nine months.

We cared for the people who were doing the unimaginable work of cleaning up, searching, rescuing, rebuilding, and trying to make sense of what had happened.

Firefighters.

Police officers.

Sanitation workers.

Volunteers.

And so many other first responders and workers who were giving everything they had.

They Came From Everywhere

What I remember most vividly is that the chiropractors didn’t wait to be asked twice.

They came.

They came from every state in America and from seven foreign countries.

Many closed their own practices. They left their offices, their patients, their families, and their everyday lives behind. They paid their own way to New York.

They didn’t come because they were going to be paid.

They didn’t come because they expected recognition.

They came because they wanted to help.

There is something incredibly moving about seeing doctors who have never met one another come together with one common purpose: to take care of people who desperately needed them.

That was chiropractic at its best.

Working With the Red Cross

We also had the opportunity to work with the American Red Cross in a way that was unprecedented for our profession.

Every chiropractor was credentialed. Licenses and malpractice insurance were verified, and we received laminated identification badges with our photographs.

It gave us the ability to enter the area and provide care in a coordinated and professional manner.

At first, there was some resistance from the police about allowing us into certain areas.

But the firefighters insisted.

They knew what chiropractic care could do for people who were physically exhausted, injured, and under tremendous strain. They advocated for us and made sure we were allowed to help.

And before long, the police officers became some of our greatest supporters as well.

They used our services again and again.

Remembering Our Own Way

Our annual chiropractic convention was scheduled only a few weeks after September 11.

It was going to be held at the Brooklyn Marriott in downtown Brooklyn.

There was no way we could simply have a normal convention.

We needed to remember.

We organized a tribute and walked together to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Across the East River was the Manhattan skyline.

But the two towers were gone.

We stood there looking toward Ground Zero, holding candles and saying prayers.

There was grief.

There was silence.

There was disbelief.

But there was also a tremendous sense of togetherness.

We were New Yorkers.

We were Americans.

And we were chiropractors who had come together to serve.

One Year Later

The following year, we continued our remembrance at our convention.

We organized a boat ride and invited police officers, firefighters, bagpipers, and others to join us.

We traveled together on the water and stopped near the Statue of Liberty.

Once again, we remembered September 11.

Among our guests were Dr. D. D. Humber and Ron Hendrickson from the ICA.

It was another opportunity to honor the people who had been lost and the heroes who had worked so tirelessly in the aftermath.

What I Learned

When I look back now, 25 years later, I realize that September 11 taught me many things.

It taught me about courage.

It taught me about loss.

It taught me about the extraordinary generosity of strangers.

But perhaps most importantly, it taught me something about the profession I had devoted my life to.

I saw chiropractors from across America and around the world put everything else aside because their fellow human beings needed them.

They didn’t ask what they would receive in return.

They simply asked where they could go and what they could do.

That spirit has stayed with me all these years.

We have an amazing profession.

A profession filled with people who give for the sake of giving and love for the sake of loving.

Twenty-five years later, I am still deeply proud of what our profession did after September 11.

I am proud of every chiropractor who came to New York.

I am proud of those who left their practices and traveled across the country.

I am proud of those who worked long hours, day after day, caring for the people who were trying to put our city back together.

And I am proud that when our fellow human beings needed us, we came.

We showed up.

We served.

We cared.

And we remembered.

September 11 changed all of our lives.

But it also showed me something I will carry with me forever:

The heart of chiropractic is the heart of service.

And after all these years, I can say it with even greater pride:

I am so proud to be a chiropractor.

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Not very long ago, the whole idea behind Make America Healthy Again was treated as something marginal, something that just wasn’t on the radar of ordinary people. You weren’t supposed to ask why American children were getting sicker. You weren’t supposed to ask why chronic disease kept climbing while we spent more on healthcare than any nation on earth. You weren’t supposed to question the chemicals in our food, the power of the pharmaceutical companies, or a medical system that creates and then manages illness far more aggressively than it ever tries to prevent it.

MAHA changed that. And here’s what I want you to understand: our first great victory wasn’t a law or an executive order. It was breaking the silence. Millions of Americans started asking the same simple question at the same time: Why does the wealthiest country in the world have the sickest children? And that question has traveled from podcasts and hospitals and kitchen tables all the way to the White House, into Congress, into state legislatures, medical schools, hospitals, supermarkets, and corporate boardrooms.

Because MAHA is bigger than any of us now. It’s an idea. It’s out in the world, it has its own force, and that force is only gaining strength. You can tell, because everyone is suddenly trying to co-opt it. You’ve got AOC saying she believes in it, while attacking the very people who fought to make it top of mind. You’ve got CNN and Politico and The New York Times attacking it from every direction at once: one day it’s not moving fast enough, the next day it’s dangerous and moving too fast.

That’s what it looks like when an idea becomes unstoppable. And underneath it, millions of Americans are quietly changing their lives, changing what they eat, the pharmaceutical products they are willing to put into their bodies, and realizing there are no experts they can trust. They need to become CEOs of their own bodies and make informed decisions.

Because science became a marketing tool for somebody’s product. And of course the people who use science as a marketing tool will call us anti-science or anti-capitalist. But we are as pro-science and as pro-capitalist as you can get.

We want to unleash an epic era of open innovation, encourage the fast-tracking of real breakthroughs that make people from all over the world come here for treatments they can’t get anywhere else rather than American citizens traveling around the world for treatments that are not available here. Believing in science means believing in a process that delivers better health, at a fair price, within reach of ordinary people. We are getting there with the current administration that is fighting corruption, and fighting fraud, waste and abuse.

And the progress is real.

The federal government has rewritten its nutrition guidelines around a principle that never should have been controversial: eat real food. The FDA is moving against petroleum-based dyes, and companies representing roughly forty percent of the food and beverage industry have committed to pulling them out.

We’re finally moving to close the GRAS loophole that let manufacturers declare their own new chemicals safe without any oversight.

Forty-two states have adopted MAHA legislation. Twenty-three SNAP waivers now keep taxpayer benefits from paying for soda and candy. Lunchrooms across the country are serving real food again.

Dozens of medical schools have committed to actually teaching nutrition, because 1.2 million people die every year from food-induced chronic disease, and eighty-five percent of that is preventable.

The Presidential Fitness Test is back.

And on vaccines, we’re seeing what would’ve been unthinkable just two years ago: the childhood schedule reviewed instead of relentlessly expanded, parental and religious exemptions defended, and honest research into vaccine safety and the true causes of autism finally underway.

But let me be honest with you. MAHA has not won. Not yet. And maybe there’s never a final victory over the relentless onslaught of greed and corruption that circle public health. A press release is not a healthier child. A voluntary pledge is not a product changing on the shelf. A proposed rule is not a final rule. Powerful industries do not surrender billions because someone asked them politely. There is and always will be resistance — from the food companies, the drug companies, the lobbyists, the bureaucracies, and the operatives who got rich off the system that failed our children, failed all of us.

Now, I know that for a lot of you; the progress hasn’t come fast enough. Secretary Kennedy spoke to that directly last week at the Children’s Health Defense conference. He didn’t dodge it. “A lot of people in this community,” he said, “get frustrated about the slowness in government,” he said. “A lot of them expected me to come in and make sense of this whole system and bring changes immediately.” And he explained why it can’t happen overnight: “In government, a bunch of things have to happen before something else happens, or you get sued. It’s a very laborious system, and there’s a lot of inertia built in.” We’re putting science first, he said, and “unfortunately, we’ve had a dearth of science for thirty years.”

But his message was unmistakable: “You have friends in the White House, and we are doing this one day at a time. We’ve accomplished in nineteen months things that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago.”

And here’s what I need every frustrated person in this movement to hear, because it matters more than anything else I’ll say today. Your impatience is not a flaw. It’s one of the greatest strengths this movement has. The job of any activist has always been to push, to demand more, to refuse to settle. So stay focused. Keep demanding more, better, quicker change. But don’t let frustration be co-opted by Big Pharma, Big Ag, and Big Food. Don’t do for free what they’ve been paying people to do for years.

If your frustration turns into pulling back your support — sitting out, staying home, punishing this administration for not moving fast enough — think hard about what you’re actually doing. You’re not summoning some purer, faster, more perfect folk hero. There is no magic third option waiting in the wings. Let’s not hand the reins of government right back to the people who held them during Covid. The same people who gave us the mandates, the lockdowns, the censorship, the loss of your rights, and the injuries so many families in this movement are still living with today. To the people who failed their way to the top, the people who are working for Big Pharma, Big Food and Big Ag. That is the real alternative.

So yes, progress is slow, because the system was built to maximize profits at the expense of public health. This is why MAHA has to be bigger than any one administration. ,

This movement, this idea, has to belong to the parents, the doctors, the farmers, the teachers, the scientists, and the citizens, permanently. We changed the national conversation. Now we have to change health outcomes. And we do that by staying in the fight, together, aiming our fire at the entrenched system and never at each other. Because, as Bobby says, we have to love our children more than we hate each other. And this administration, while not perfect, has in fact done more in 19 months than any administration in 50 years. That’s why the companies who have been poisoning us have been spending more on lobbyists in the past two years than they’ve ever spent. They know they are losing.

Our anger, our frustration, our boldness is a sign that we are winning. We’ve made extraordinary progress. But this is only the beginning. And if we stay courageous, stay alert and refuse to bow down to pestilence, refuse to allow ourselves to be co-opted or manipulated or tricked, we can strive and succeed to become healers. We can leave our children a healthier country.

Now, we have a tremendous lineup of guests today. You’ll hear from Noah Syndergaard. Julie Lapidus. Dr. Joseph Antoun. Derek Merrin. Dr. Daniel Pompa. Lina Lyons Hjalmarsson. Miriam Eckenfels. And Russell Brand.

But first, we’re joined by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna of Florida. She is one of MAHA’s most powerful champions in Congress. She was the architect of the Luna Amendment, which passed the House Farm Bill and stripped pesticide companies of their liability shield. She is one of the most fearless voices in Congress for transparency, accountability, and the right of Americans to question what they’ve been told. Representative Luna, welcome back to the MAHA Media Hub.

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The agencies said in a press release that they will “exchange scientific information, identify research gaps, and expand research into potential human health effects” of glyphosate, a chemical weed killer used widely in farming.

In making the announcement, HHS Secretary Kennedy said, “Americans have a right to know what the best science tells us about the chemicals they encounter in their food, workplaces, and environment.”

He added, “We are bringing the scientific resources of HHS to the table to answer unresolved questions, strengthen the evidence, and give EPA the data it needs to conduct a rigorous review. We will ask the hard questions, demand sound science, and follow the evidence wherever it leads. This partnership advances President Trump’s Make America Healthy Again agenda by putting the health of the American people first.”

The search for answers will be bolstered by HHS and EPA first creating a joint technical ‘working group’ comprised of experts from the EPA, including its Office of Pesticide Programs; and HHS groups, including the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Toxicology Program, National Cancer Institute, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Environmental Health, and Food and Drug Administration. The new working group will formulate top science questions and, as the agency’s press release states, “coordinate research and information-sharing, and align its work with EPA’s registration-review schedule.”

Explained EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin: “FIFRA [Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act] requires us to reexamine registered pesticides on a recurring cycle against the best available science, and that is exactly what we are doing with glyphosate.”

Zeldin continued, “This agreement with Secretary Kennedy and HHS gives our scientists access to research capacity at HHS that addresses potential gaps in the record. EPA will weigh what that work produces the way we weigh any other scientific evidence. We will evaluate the relevant evidence, address important scientific questions, and show our work, providing insight into how the science informs our decisions, as we always do, to conduct the most transparent and thorough review possible.”

On June 25, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, that federal pesticide laws preempt state law “failure-to-warn” claims against Monsanto/ Bayer, makers of Roundup. Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored the majority opinion, which overturned a Missouri jury verdict that had awarded damages to a plaintiff, John Durnell, who developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma following long-term Roundup use.

Some MAHA leaders were angered by this SCOTUS decision.

The new EPA-HHS partnership will increase government transparency around scientific research into glyphosate.

The HHS press release offers specifics about the agencies’ investigation into glyphosate, stating, “EPA’s human health risk assessment will address exposure to glyphosate-based formulations, dietary exposure including from preharvest applications, and occupational exposure, and will evaluate the available cancer, genotoxicity, reproductive, and developmental evidence.”

It continues, “FIFRA and the Food Quality Protection Act require EPA to determine that there is a reasonable certainty of no harm from aggregate dietary exposure, with particular attention to infants and children. The working group will help EPA identify consequential data gaps that may warrant additional research, testing, or monitoring, including emerging areas such as the microbiome.”

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Committed to expanding organic food production and consumption, and to protecting the integrity of the organic brand, OTA connects organic food businesses from farmer to consumer, including growers, processors, retailers, certifiers, and others. The 2026 Organic Week Agenda included an array of speakers on topics relevant to the organic food supply chain, addressing many issues important to the MAHA base.

The first day of the conference surveyed themes including the historical growth of organic food demand, how to improve retail sales of organic foods, and the current challenges and needs of organic producers. Maine Democrat Congresswoman (and organic farmer) Chellie Pingree spoke for one session.

Day Two included discussions of important farming legislation (including the Farm Bill); research about Gen Z and Millennial food purchasing patterns; farmland access; and the proven health outcomes of organic diets. Various panels and speakers referenced the MAHA movement’s influence on Americans’ purchasing decisions, how it has contributed to growing demand for organic products, and whether the MAHA acronym will still resonate politically in five years.

At 3:00, Secretary Kennedy joined the standing-room-only crowd on stage for a session titled, “A Healthier America Starts with Food: A Fireside Chat with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.” The iconic leader of the MAHA movement did not disappoint. He warmly welcomed Tom’s inquiries and made clear his support for increasing organic food production. At one point he said, “Every item of food in my home has an organic label on it!”

From the outset, Kennedy emphasized that the corporate media have focused tremendous resources to discuss measles and other infectious diseases, but not the chronic disease crisis impacting far more Americans. He recounted the distressing statistics for rates of obesity and diabetes in American youth, then pivoted to the myriad policy shifts he’s overseen in his brief tenure at HHS. These, he said, are beginning to reverse the depressing stats.

Under Secretary Kennedy, HHS is determined to make large and lasting change. Using the new U.S. dietary guidelines to influence federal policy, USDA updated retailer stocking standards in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The final rule was published May 7, 2026, and requires retailers (other than specialty stores) to stock at least seven varieties in each staple food category – dairy, grains, protein, and vegetables or fruits – on a continuous basis to participate in the SNAP system. The new rule also requires retailers offer at least one perishable variety in at least three of the four staple categories. Kennedy triumphantly reported to the OTA audience that over 100,000 grocery stores have implemented the new requirements.

Similar shifts have been implemented in school lunch programs, prisons, and hospitals. Kennedy was particularly enthusiastic about changes being witnessed in U.S. military diets. He praised military procurement specialist Robert Irvine for helping transform military meals into healthier MAHA options at a lower cost than the processed foods they replaced.

The secretary said that on bases where they implemented these improvements, soldiers who had routinely left base to eat at McDonald’s now prefer the new “bistros” Irvine helped create. Under Kennedy, HHS and its sub-agencies are committed to ensuring America’s defenders are as healthy as possible– reflecting the core MAHA philosophy that wholesome foods will enhance health and immune function. As Chef Irvine has observed, “Give someone a brand-new Mercedes and fill it with olive oil. It won’t go very far.”

Secretary Kennedy addressed hospital food with equal passion. “If you go to someone’s house and tell them the meal they serve you tastes like hospital food, it’s not meant to be a compliment,” he said. “We are changing hospital diets dramatically, learning from cooks like Geoffrey Zakarian.”

RFK Jr. summarized all of these transformative policy shifts as MAHA-inspired “changes to our dietary culture and addictions to processed foods” that are “training children’s palates to desire healthy food.” He dismissed partisan conflicts in this continuing MAHA mission, calling upon Americans to come together because “There’s no such thing as Republican or Democrat children.”

OTA’s Chapman wrapped up the presentation by thanking the secretary for his contribution not only to OTA’s Annual conference but also to the American organic food system by attending.

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Riley Gaines still remembers the moment and day when a swimmer, who came from virtually nowhere, won the 500-yard freestyle by 1.75 seconds: March 17, 2022, at the NCAA championships. The swimmers who finished second and third in that race, Emma Weyant and Erica Sullivan, had both won silver medals at the Tokyo Olympics.

But who was the winning swimmer?

The next day, Gaines touched the wall in a dead tie for fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle with that same swimmer: Lia Thomas, a 6-foot-2 athlete who spent three seasons on the University of Pennsylvania men’s team and was competing as a woman despite being a biological male.

The real clincher came on the podium. NCAA officials handed the only fifth-place trophy to Thomas, for photographs. One official told her plainly, “We only have one fifth place trophy, so yours will be coming in the mail. We went ahead and gave the fifth place trophy to Thomas, but you can pose on the podium with the sixth place trophy.”

Gaines, true to her MAHA spirit, was not pleased. She began to speak out.

That decision, more than the race itself, showed Gaines that the people running the sport had already decided what they wanted to showcase, and it wasn’t her.

Gaines said one of the first people to reach out was Lance Armstrong, who called her just days after the story broke, incredulous. Armstrong knew anti-doping enforcement first hand. During his competitive cycling years, doping was rampant; it wound up costing him everything, not just his seven Tour de France titles, but an Olympic bronze medal and every podium finish across 14 years of racing. To him, the comparison was obvious. He had lost everything for chemically enhancing his body, while an athlete born with the physical advantages of a male – including a larger skeleton, greater muscle mass, and a bigger heart and lungs – could compete against women after just a year of hormone suppression.

When Gaines spoke out against athletes like Thomas, she met significant pushback. She was shouted down, protested, and even physically attacked for saying publicly what many other female athletes would only say in private. Speaking to students at Truett McConnell University in Georgia, she summed up her response to her critics: “When they want you silent, speak louder.”

Gaines grew up around athletes and competition. Her father, Brad Gaines, played football at Vanderbilt, in Nashville, and her mother, Telisha Gaines, played softball at Austin Peay State University, also in Tennessee. By her senior year at Kentucky, Gaines was the reigning SEC champion in the 200-yard freestyle and the fastest swimmer in the country in the 200 butterfly, with her sights set on an NCAA title outright, not a fifth tie she’d have to share credit for.

Now 26, Gaines lives in Nashville with her husband, Louis Barker, whom she met at Kentucky and married in 2022. The couple has a daughter, born last fall. Reflecting on the one pivotal meet during which she was upstaged by Thomas, years before her daughter arrived, Gaines said she knew she needed to stand up for herself, thinking of the example she would want to set for her future children. As she watches her daughter grow, she’s grateful she made her views public.

Today, via a successful podcast, The Riley Gaines Show, Gaines speaks often about the pressure young women face to delay marriage and motherhood for career first; motherhood, she says, is the most profoundly perfect thing a woman can do. Her newest book, 1, 2, 3, We Are Free!, published by Brave Books for the country’s 250th anniversary, teaches toddlers how to count alongside faith, family and freedom.

Gaines is just as pointed about the pressure for women to shrink themselves, physically. As culture drifts back toward thin as the paradigm for beauty, she argues that real female empowerment runs in the opposite direction — toward strength.

“As female athletes, we spend our lives building strength, muscle, and a body that is powerful and functional,” she said. “It’s incredibly disheartening to see the culture pivot back to a ‘thin is in’ mentality that tells young girls they need to shrink themselves to be valued.”

Gaines added. “True empowerment isn’t about fading away into Hollywood’s extreme standards; it’s about embracing biological strength, health, and what our bodies are actually capable of achieving.”

What actually makes a woman attractive, Gaines argues, is standing in her power: strength, muscle, and confidence to know who she is and what she wants out of life.

And her activism around transgender athletes has proven prescient:

One by one, the governing bodies of sport came around to the position Gaines has espoused since 2022. Her own sport moved first. In June 2022, just three months after Lia Thomas’s win, World Aquatics, swimming’s international governing body, barred from all women’s events any male-to-female transgender athlete who had gone through male puberty. That standard would have excluded Thomas outright.

The reasoning came down to the physical traits male puberty locks in regardless of later hormone therapy: bigger, denser bones, broader shoulders, larger lungs, a bigger heart, and greater muscle mass — the very build that gives a swimmer the edge in the water.

Then, in February 2025, the NCAA, which allowed Thomas to compete in the first place, reversed itself entirely, barring any athlete identified as male at birth from women’s competition, no exceptions. The rule Gaines fought in 2022 is no longer NCAA policy today.

Gaines is still making the case she first made in 2022, now on a far bigger stage. Twice a week she hosts The Riley Gaines Show on OutKick, a Fox News Media platform, interviewing sitting senators and fellow female athletes and taking on cultural targets from campus activism to the messages Gen Z women absorb from influencer culture.

In January 2026, Gaines stood on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court as the justices weighed state bans on male athletes in women’s sports, and a bill bearing her name is now moving through Congress.

What began for Gaines as one ‘stolen’ trophy in Atlanta has become the question she asks every girl she meets today — the same one she asked on that podium in Atlanta: If you won’t stand up for yourself, who do you expect will do it for you?

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So, President Trump took another tack. On September 4, he issued two Executive Orders (EOs) – one directing the USDA to expand interstate meat sales (aimed at helping the little guy rancher/farmer ship meat across state lines, something the nation’s four biggest meat producers do); and a second directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to start delisting gray and Mexican wolves (known for their predation), while also directing the USDA to review mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef.

More specifically, “Promoting Fair Competition in Livestock Markets and Expanding Market Access for American Meat Producers” seeks to counter unfair trade practices and monopolization in the meat processing industry, expand small-scale processing facilities with USDA support, reduce burdensome regulations, and lower processing costs for producers and consumers alike.

And “Supporting America’s Ranchers” addresses rancher concerns over wolf predation, directs the USDA to assess whether the U.S. can legally impose country-of-origin labeling, and closes with an all-agency directive to “benefit American consumers in the form of lower prices to the maximum extent possible.” Country-of-origin labeling is a hot topic for ranchers and diners alike.

Concurrent with these September 4 executive orders, the USDA announced four new initiatives to support producers through its existing Ranchers First Initiative.

The agency is expanding the use of its Conservation Reserve Program to enroll nearly 1 million new acres of grasslands; doubling the number of producers and plants in its remote grading program, which employs modern technology to more efficiently grade beef carcasses remotely; increasing adoption of instrument-enhanced grading technology; and becoming more aggressive in defending agricultural producers from abusive litigation.

Still, President Trump is stuck in a conundrum not of his making, and the entire nation is stuck with him.

Years of severe drought, industry consolidation, and low profitability have shrunk the U.S. beef herd to its lowest numbers in 75 years. The RFK Jr.-fueled MAHA revolution has increased consumer demand for domestic beef, especially organic, grass-fed cuts and burger, beef tallow, and all foods wholesome and local. An unprecedented decrease in livestock supply has now collided with a spike in supermarket demand, which has spiked.

The nation’s food pyramid now recommends meats and fewer carbohydrates. Cheeseburgers are no longer condemned as dangerous but are now embraced as healthy. As a result, a pound of hamburger that cost $5.19 in March 2019 has increased 62%, to an average of $8.41 per pound in July 2026.

This is a perfect economic storm for hamburger prices, amplified by the upcoming midterms, during which affordability features prominently in voters’ minds.

The MAHA movement is truly bipartisan. Most of those No Kings protesters (if not vegan) are likely frequent visitors to local farmers’ markets, or pay top dollar for local grass-fed tenderloin. Yet much like the egg price crisis of early 2025, President Trump will be faulted for high beef prices despite his best efforts, including those two recent EOs. Meanwhile, the ranchers he has alienated by trying to appease consumers may also stay home in November and not vote.

This is the Scylla and Charybdis the president must navigate for the midterms, but the nation will still face for years: how to rebuild the nation’s beef herd while accommodating greater MAHA demand for healthy hamburgers? If prices rise too high, struggling livestock owners benefit, but consumers may riot in the streets; if grocery store hamburger prices plummet, more U.S. ranchers will go bankrupt or quit, and the nation will depend ever more on foreign producers.

High beef prices also pressure ranchers and farmers to liquidate breeding stock, which is counter to expanding the nation’s herd. This is a national security issue as well as an economic and health one.

To his credit, President Trump has recognized the growing crisis and committed resources to finding solutions. In his February 6 proclamation, “Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer,” he increased in-quota beef imports of lean trimmings from Argentina by 80,000 metric tons for the year. (Lean trimmings are added to U.S. domestic beef fat to make hamburgers.)

Unsurprisingly, prices have continued to climb, prompting the president’s controversial August 26 proclamation, “Further Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer,” which increased the permissible duty-exempt lean trimmings another 300,000 metric tons for 90 days, without limiting countries of origin. This infuriated many ranchers who felt betrayed by the administration.

The new 90-day window opened on September 3. President Trump subsequently referenced Brazil as a likely source of the lean trimmings. Both of these announcements spurred more criticism.

These efforts to deliver on campaign promises to lower grocery prices were followed by two executive orders designed to deliver on campaign promises to support America’s ranchers and farmers.

The problem of inflated beef prices facing Americans and the Trump administration will not be resolved overnight. Unlike chicken eggs or pork chops, U.S. agriculture cannot ramp up beef cow production overnight. Chickens lay eggs almost daily; pigs farrow (give birth) twice yearly, often with litters of a dozen or more piglets. But a cow generally has only one calf each year, which in turn requires 18 months (two years for grass-fed) to mature for market.

Market prices for hamburger meat will likely remain unchanged in the near term as many ranchers say the cost savings from expanded imports of lean trimmings will not trickle down to the consumer.

What is required in the long term is a profound reassessment of the U.S. food production system.

Speaking on the MAHA Media Hub on September 9, regenerative farmer Mollie Engelhart said that President Trump cannot unilaterally make the changes necessary to truly transform the U.S. beef industry and rebuild the national herd. Engelhart credits the president for focusing the nation on this vital cause, but explained that much more must be done.

“Ultimately, it needs to be a congressional movement,” she said. “It can’t be an executive order because an executive order can just get flipped by somebody else.”

Idaho cattle rancher Glenn Elzinga is skeptical that importing 300,000 metric tons of lean trimmings will have much impact on a market in which Americans eat some 76 million pounds of beef daily. However, he watched prices for feeder cattle (young animals raised for sale at maturity) slide about 10% on the import news, noting that most ranchers operate on single-digit profit margins.

“When the price drops 10%, things can go red in a hurry. Ranchers are NOT happy,” he told The MAHA Report in an email.

Elzinga believes the U.S. beef herd will be rebuilt slowly, but that hamburger prices will be high for some time.

“In the short term, it just gets uglier,” he said. “Heifer retention practices will probably fix the supply side of the economy no earlier than five years from now. But I could easily see it taking quite a bit longer than that.”

The beef market faces unique challenges that will likely keep burger prices high for some time. Yet many of the tensions the beef debate has presented extend to agriculture more widely and raise the question of how to produce healthier food for all Americans while ensuring the nation’s ranchers and farmers earn a fair income.

The MAHA movement has created greater demand for healthier foods. Over the long term, this will reduce healthcare costs and combat chronic disease. It will also create new marketing opportunities for America’s ranchers and farmers, both domestically and abroad.

MAHA consumers and the nation’s livestock producers must become strong allies. They need each other, and are growing more aware of that vital MAHA connection. Americans must come together to support both, just as President Trump is trying to do.

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Secretary Kennedy delivered the event’s keynote speech.

Other speakers included Sen. Ron Johnson, Sen. Rand Paul, Rep. Thomas Massie, Andrew Wakefield, Mark Gorton, Katherine Paul, Michael Kane, Kim Mack Rosenberg, Esq., Sayer Ji, Jan Jekielek, Mary Holland, Esq., Brian Hooker, PhD., Miriam Eckenfels, Esq., and Polly Tommey.

The all-day event took place at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, DC.

[Below is the full text of Lyons’ speech along with the CHD video recording. The text was altered slightly for clarity.]

I was thinking about what to say today, and then I was thinking maybe I’ll start with a story that some of you guys haven’t heard. When my daughter was about four years old, I remember that we had a party in my apartment on the Upper West Side in New York City. We had 50, 60 people there. It was very civilized. My daughter was wearing a white dress and she was so incredibly beautiful and calm and sweet. And she was carrying around a little tray. And I remember that really clearly. And a bunch of people came up to me as they had at her school many times and asked me what we do to make her so sweet, so friendly, so generous, so calm. And I, of course, had to give all the credit to my ex-wife, Helena Hjalmarsson.

But then, a few weeks later, my daughter got six vaccines in one day for, I think, for 12 viruses. And she had a massive seizure. She regressed very quickly — so much so that the mother of one of her friends, who lived in our building, a co-op on West Eighty-First Street, ran up to me and said, ‘What happened to your daughter’?

What had happened to her is that she suddenly just turned into a different person. She was speaking pretty well in Swedish and in English. She was doing great in school. She was very happy, very outgoing, had a lot of friends — and then she wasn’t able to speak in any language. She lost all of her previously acquired skills, and she just was screaming and upset and biting herself and running in front of things and had serious neurological damage, probably from the seizures.

It started with one massive seizure, and then it turned into a seizure disorder. And so she wasn’t able to tell the difference between hot and cold. She was just in really bad shape. And that was kind of day and night for a very long time.

I was told by a lot of people that what I had seen with my own eyes never happened. And that, of course, has a big impact on how you see the world.

I’ve been a book publisher for a while. And like Mary [Holland] said, I run Skyhorse Publishing. We have published about 12,000 books and have a whole bunch of imprints. I used to be friends with a lot of people in book publishing, too. I used to go out to lunch with the heads of big publishing companies. But I’ve lost all of those friendships because, basically, once again, what I watched happen and then what I heard from so many other people — [that it] actually didn’t happen and that I’d gone off the deep end.

What I realized then is that kind of thing can be true in all kinds of areas. And then I began to publish books that challenged the status quo or the prevailing views in all kind of areas and published hundreds and hundreds of books that just make people angry. But I think that’s a good thing and it sort of led me to the point where I thought, ‘Why do people read books? What’s the point of books? If you’re going to open a book and know what you’re going to think after you’re done reading it, then you have no business reading, right?’ Like what’s the point of it? If you can tell from the cover that this is a book that’s going to confirm all your biases, then you should just stop. You should save yourself the five hours; there are plenty of other things you can do. Spend the time with your family, go to the gym, do something else meaningful.

That became my kind of publishing motto — that books should really challenge everything, that they should make you question everything, and that everything ought to be on the table. That we don’t know the truth, and that if you believe in science, there of course is no truth. And there’s constant change, and there’s innovation.

But virtually everybody in America knows, as a fact, maybe one of the most important facts in their lives — because it gets more coverage from more news organizations than any subject that I can think of — and that fact is: every vaccine made in the past, or that will be made in the future, or anything that you call a vaccine that might not have been called a vaccine in the past, because the definition, as many of us in this room know, has changed five times. All of those vaccines are safe and effective. They’re automatically safe and effective.

There was a New York Times article where I think it was Aaron Siri who said that one of the polio vaccines, with some quick comment, was obviously much less safe than the other five. And then there’s an article that comes out right away that says Bobby Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer because his friend said that 1 of 6 products was worse than the others 5. That’s crazy, that’s insane, that’s dangerous.

We all know, and any rational person ought to know, that you could take any product, of any kind, and line them up, and one of them is better than all of the others, obviously. There’s an old quote, I think it’s from Copernicus, that says: ‘my life is a dedication to the truth that around every circle, another can be drawn.’ The idea is: we can always do better. Even if at one time vaccines were relatively safe, and even if they were the best we could do at the time, we all should be open-minded with these products — and with any other product — that we could do a better job.

One of the reasons that we don’t do a better job is because there’s a 1986 Act that gives a liability shield to every vaccine company in the country, saying that you can’t sue them. We know that big pharmaceutical companies are the most criminally prosecuted companies in the country. That’s not me saying it. That’s just from court records, that they’ve received more criminal fines than any other group of companies. But we’re supposed to believe that everything that they do is perfect?

That makes me think about running into Andy Wakefield when I was walking in. He was like Bobby Kennedy is today. When I first met Andy — I think it was 2013. At the time, he was probably the most vilified doctor on the planet. And it all kind of happened quickly. And I got to know him, and I listened to him, and I thought he was really smart and sharp. And I read through a book that he had written. And I thought, you know, this is really striking. This is a story that’s going to change people’s minds. That was 13 years ago.

What happened next was that he went on — I think it was the Today Show. And I think that he thought, like a lot of people think, that the media is relatively fair. He gets on, and he’s ready for a real conversation . . . and what happened is I think they let him say three words, and then they lectured him for a couple of minutes about ‘misinformation’ and being a great danger to children, and then asked him to leave.

In his book there’s a great little anecdote that I think is a real teaching story: when he was being vilified and attacked and prosecuted by the UK government, they were able to add to a graduating class test … This is the big High School test [in England] that determines which college you’re going to go to – and has a big impact on the rest of your life. There was a question on that test that very year that asked, ‘Who is the now discredited doctor who falsely claimed that there was a connection between vaccines and autism?’ And the amazing thing about that is that you were sort of at a point — it’s almost like you’re trying to get into a nightclub and you have to get past people and you couldn’t get in. You couldn’t get into the system if you didn’t know the answer to that question.

That’s just a little piece of a whole spectrum of tactics to indoctrinate people. And I think that since then, I really started to learn the level of indoctrination prevalent in this country, where people think Bobby Kennedy is a danger. You think about that and for a long time you could read in every newspaper in the country about how dangerous and scary Bobby Kennedy’s misinformation was — his bad theories, his twisted logic. You could read stories that he did something when he was young, that young people do. He had a tough childhood. And when your father and your uncle get assassinated, you know that’s not gonna have no impact on you. So he had a colorful early life. But then he develops into this incredible human being with such integrity and such honesty, and such lack of care for himself, that he’s just dedicated to protecting children at incredible cost to himself.

The question then is: Who is he a danger to? We know that these big pharmaceutical companies are the most criminal organizations in the country. We know that Big Food companies aren’t far behind. We know a very small number of people in the United States die each year from infectious disease. We also know that the media covers a single measles death like it’s Armageddon. Even if they’re comorbidities, even if there’s a story that’s contradictory, even if you can’t get any of the facts, you just hear ‘measles.’

I would say: anytime you hear the word ‘measles’ in the media, you should think psy- op. You should think: this is a story meant to control what I think, what I do, what I believe and what my attitude towards Bobby Kennedy ought to be. The idea then is that from the things, the products that these companies make — Big Pharma, Big Food — more than 1.2 million people die each year from things that are 85% preventable. And this chronic disease epidemic that comes from these products costs 90% of our medical cost for the year. And then we think, well, what does that really mean? Then you hear this other statistic that we spend two and a half to three times what any other country on the planet spends on health care. And in almost every category, we have the worst health outcomes. And you think: how could that be possible? You’re supposed to get what you pay for, right?

If you’re spending all that money, how is it that, in every category, out of 30 industrialized countries we’re number 27, number 28, number 30, number 24, but in total we’re at the very bottom. And so I would say that that’s the kind of corruption tax that everybody in this country has been subjected to for the last generation.

If you have any logic whatsoever, you would know that the system is kind of set up just to make money, that the reason that somebody like Dr. Fauci can fail in every conceivable way and still get more and more power – over 50 years — still get a bigger and bigger salary, still hang out with more and more famous people and go on more tv shows, even though you know he’s brought in to deal with allergies, but allergies are a hockey stick during the time that he’s in charge, an obesity hockey stick you know off the charts goes from, 10, 12% to... 30, 40%, all the numbers just get astronomically worse. So how can that happen? And the answer is that somebody like Bobby Kennedy, who’s working for the American public and trying to protect our children, he’s a ‘danger’ to a group of companies and to a way of life and to government agencies that are captured by those companies.

We and Bobby Kennedy are working for families and for children. Dr. Fauci was judged by the benefit that he gave to those companies and to that system that was created to extract money from people with a total disregard for health outcomes, because there’s no way — in any company, any organization, any government agency — in our minds, we would think: somebody’s going to look at the outcomes. Somebody’s going to say, ‘I will give you a raise if you have a better outcome. I’m going to give you better job if you’ve succeeded in something.’ Obviously it looked like, for Fauci and for those companies, and for the agencies that were bribed by those companies, and the politicians who were bribe by them, that Fauci was succeeding.

So, Bobby Kennedy is a big danger to that system. And he’s breaking that system down in area after area. And if you think about how powerful these companies have become and how many lobbyists they have and how much politicians in positions of real power, how many people at agencies have been funded by them, have been supported by them, have received donations from them, you can see that that’s going to be a difficult system to dismantle.

Today’s system is like Chicago in the 1930s — where everything, all the judges, all the politicians, were owned by the mafia. In a way, Big Pharma and Big Food are mafia.

There are a lot of people out there who are saying, ‘Why isn’t Bobby doing more? Why hasn’t he fixed everything immediately?’ And that’s a great question. I love that. You guys should keep yelling and screaming and saying, ‘Hey, Bobby, do more. Fix more. Solve everything. I don’t want anything to go wrong in my life for the rest of my life.’

Bobby Kennedy has power now. But the forces that he’s up against and the progress that he has made in the face of those forces is just unprecedented.

I think in area after area we’re told that school lunches can’t be healthy, that it’s racist to want healthy school lunches. It’s classist, that poor people can’t afford to have healthy food. But the problem with that? It’s another story that comes from the companies that benefit from that narrative.

We also know that in countries all around the world, kids eat healthy, whole, real food for lunches at a fraction of the cost. The Japanese government was able to find a way to get healthy, real food to every student and every school in the entire country for half the price of our school lunches. So, you think about that. That whole narrative — that’s all a lie. It’s not about money. Like I said, we all know that we spend three times on health care what any other country spends, and our health outcomes are worse. We spend now two times on school lunches, and we get food that causes chronic disease. We send people to the hospital, and they eat ultra-processed food, food with dyes in it, food with 10,000 chemicals, when in Europe there are only something like 300 chemicals that are legal to put into food.

Everything in this country over the last generation has just been connected to money, but also to the false narratives that support that system and so the question is how does that change? These companies have literally trillions of dollars and they’re going to do everything that makes sense to them, and one of the things they’re going do is say, ‘Well, if our income from this group of products is this and it’s going to cost us this much money to fight Bobby Kennedy, that’s a good deal. Like maybe we can actually win. Maybe we can stall. Maybe we wait them out.’ And then we’ll get probably say, ‘what if we fund Democrats?’

Because Big Pharma doesn’t care about left or right, or right or wrong. They just care about selling their products and making as much money as they can. So, they would say, “Well, what if we fund Democrats and we win the midterms, right? What’s going to happen then? Maybe then we can promise to do a lot of things. We can take baby steps, and then as soon as Bobby has a little bit less power, as soon as he’s being dragged into congressional hearings, we can roll it all back.’

That’s a playbook, and these companies have a lot tricks, a very complex set of steps that they take to get the outcomes that they want — and they invent new ones all the time, and the latest is that they’re adopting MAHA terminology, saying ‘we agree with you on all these different things’ because if you can’t beat somebody then you try to co-opt them and you see that kind of thing with peptides now.

My feeling is that one must win in the marketplace of ideas, and one of the things that stands in the way of that is corruption, propaganda, and all of these false narratives. And you know, if you don’t have liability shields, then that’s a kind of a safety signal that is sent out. And if you have a liability shield, then there’s no signal, because nobody has anything to force them to do something different.

People sometimes say that MAHA or CHD or any of these big sorts of constellations of aligned organizations — that they’re anti-business. And I would say: we’re more pro-business than any group of companies because we want things. Because we want things to progress. We want real science. And real science means that you can challenge everything and that there’s an incentive to challenge things. And that if you challenge things and you succeed and you create a better product, then you’re going to win. And then people are gonna buy your product. They’re going to know about the side effects that come from it. They’re going to have to pay for the damage of the side-effects. And, you know, Bobby Kennedy knew that.

When Bobby was trying to, in 1999, when he was one of Time Magazine’s “heroes of the planet” for his environmental work, he was pro-business then and he’s pro-business now. He realized that if companies had to pay for their pollution, they would pollute less. And that of course makes sense. If a vaccine company has to pay, they’re going to make safer vaccines. If some vaccines can’t be made safely, they’re going to stop making them. And they’re going to make some of those decisions based on their liability. The same, I think, will be true with pesticides, that if you have glyphosate in every bit of water in the country, not only do we lose all of our choice, because we can’t choose whether to have glyphosate or not have glyphosate. This is a product made by a company. Because it’s ubiquitous, we have some choice left but that choice is between things that are not good. We can choose between different types of sodas or different types of French fries or different brands of fast food, but to have a real choice you need that real liability, so our media really challenges companies.

If you look at the failure of the media in this country, the failure of investigative journalism over the last generation, it’s really just died. And many of you here who are journalists, I think there’s some in the back — I would say, you should really look at yourselves and you should wonder, why is it that you can’t question things? Somebody came to me the other day and they wanted a comment, and they said there’s a MAHA Summit on September 28 and 29, and they said, ‘Oh you’re taking money from a bunch of different companies and we’d like to talk about those companies and doesn’t it feel like you’re being co-opted by these companies.’ I was thinking — that’s a reasonable question — nothing wrong with that question but the much bigger question is, ‘Why aren’t those same so-called investigative journalists looking at every member of Congress, every . . .’

(applause)

Why aren’t they looking at every member of their own ranks who failed to investigate all the Big Food companies and the Big Pharma companies and the Big Ag companies that are responsible for 1.2 million deaths or more per year? That is the real epidemic in this country.

In what world, in what kind of rational world, would every major newspaper, every news show, cover four people getting measles? Now, people can be harmed by measles . . . that’s not the question. The question is, why are you covering that? And why haven’t you covered more than a million people dying every year from preventable chronic disease? Why do you not care about that?

One possible answer — I don’t want to make any accusations, but one possible answer could be that, and I looked this up this morning on ChatGPT because I had seen higher numbers and I believe they probably are higher, but ChatGPT says at 25% of all of the advertising dollars at major news stations in this country come from Big Pharma and a somewhat smaller number comes from Big Food. So, something like half of the advertising dollars come from the companies that are giving us this outcome of more than a million deaths and they don’t get investigated and, for a generation, neither the right nor the left has had any congressional investigations on them, has really gone after this problem, which is of epic proportions. And then Bobby Kennedy comes along.

I’m going to end with the idea of how dangerous Bobby is. And the truth is that he really is dangerous. A lot of people might have to change the way they act and might have change the products that they sell to every child in America and to every adult in America and start to do a better job like countries all around the world do. And if you look at the fact that even right now, people have a health problem, somebody gets a certain kind of cancer, and the system is just kind of blocked. So they go all around the world to countries that will give them better care, or they need a certain kind of surgery and they go to Berlin, they need stem cell treatments and they got to Mexico or the Caribbean or they go Canada to get cheaper drugs. You think about that and you realize we’ve had a government that hasn’t protected us. We’ve had system that’s at war with us. And our government is supposed to work for us. They’re supposed to have our interests at heart.

I think Bobby Kennedy is the most dangerous individual to this system, who’s come along in a generation. And you’re still, you’re not going to have perfect days from the day that he came into power. But I think that every child in America is going to be healthier for the work that he’s done, for the MAHA wins that are coming up day after day, that are almost never covered by any news station.

You see AOC using MAHA talking points now. That’s a victory. You even see Eli Lilly making comments about how much exercise and eating healthy food is important. And you wonder why that is because they never did that before. So, we’ve been able to win this cultural war. And that I think that’s where the biggest victory comes from.

With the actual laws, there’s a system in place — and I’m going to keep saying it — and this system is meant to maintain itself and the status quo. And it’s meant to reject change. But change is science. We’ve had the most anti-science system in place of any country in the history of mankind. We’ve rejected change and progress more than any other country, more than any other civilization. We’ve just stopped things, and we’ve done that for one reason only: because there’s a revenue stream coming from the way things are. They’re factories built that cost billions of dollars to retool, and these companies don’t want to do that. And they’re not going to do so unless they’re forced to do it. We can’t expect the media to force them to, we can’t expect the government — even this much better, much stronger, much more well-intentioned government — because there are all these roadblocks that are set up in our system.

But the thing is —we can change it, because we’ve seen things now that we can never unsee. There are only so many children who can be poisoned without their parents saying, ‘this is it! I’m not believing anything anymore. I’m doing what I’m told. I’m putting into my body or reading books or doing anything that I’m indoctrinated to do. I’m going to question everything.’’ And so people say, ‘questioning things is dangerous.’ It is.

You know, there’s a great book called Civilization and in that book it says lack of confidence can kill a civilization. The author says we can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusionment just as effectively as with bombs. But I would say this: I would say, we trusted them, we believed in them, we thought that it couldn’t be possible. We thought it can’t be a conspiracy. There are too many people who are involved. It’s hundreds and hundreds of companies. It’s thousands of powerful people. Would they all be willing to poison our children? And what we learned is ‘yes.’ So, we don’t trust them anymore. We’re not going to trust them. We’re going to question everything. We’re going to think for ourselves. We’re going to fight for medical freedom because we know you can’t do worse than we’ve done. The things that everybody says are the great dangers of Bobby Kennedy . . . all those things already happened. And Bobby Kennedy is now coming in and trying to change them. I’m really grateful.

Thank you for listening. And soon we’re going to hear from Bobby Kennedy himself.

One last thing that I wanted to say is that I know all the people at CHD and all the leadership really well, and I think they’re doing phenomenal work. And I want to encourage everybody to do everything they can to help CHD. Mary Holland works around the clock. She’s incredibly dedicated. She and her whole team - they don’t ask for gratitude. She’s not out there bragging about all the successes she’s had, but she’s just been a critical person in the progress that we’ve made. And this organization has been so important in so many different ways, over so many years. And I’m proud to know them, to have learned about all the different things that they’re doing — and I just think we should all give a big round of applause for CHD.

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[HHS Secretary Kennedy was the keynote speaker at the September 17 conference, “CHD in DC: In Order to Form a More Perfect Future.” The all-day event took place at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, DC. Other speakers included Sen. Ron Johnson, Sen. Rand Paul, Rep. Thomas Massie, Andrew Wakefield, Mark Gorton, Katherine Paul, Michael Kane, Kim Mack Rosenberg, Esq.,Tony Lyons, Sayer Ji, Jan Jekielek, Mary Holland, Esq., Brian Hooker, PhD., Miriam Eckenfels, Esq., and Polly Tommey. This article was published in The Defender, a publication of Children’s Health Defense. Reprinted with their permission.]

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a sold-out Children’s Health Defense (CHD) conference Thursday that the health-freedom movement has “a strong and steadfast friend at the White House.”

Kennedy urged the audience to be patient as the administration works through a slow-moving federal bureaucracy.

“You have friends in the White House, and we are doing this one day at a time,” Kennedy said during his keynote address at the “CHD in DC” conference in Washington. “We’re putting the science before any changes. … Unfortunately, we’ve had a dearth of science for 30 years.”

Kennedy, who co-founded CHD several years before becoming secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), acknowledged that many people in the health freedom movement expected faster results after he took office.

“A lot of people in this community get frustrated about the slowness in government,” he said. “A lot of them expected me to come in and make sense of this whole system and bring changes immediately.”

But federal agencies cannot simply change policies overnight, he said.

“In government, a bunch of things have to happen before something else happens, or you get sued,” Kennedy said. “It’s a very laborious system, and there’s a lot of inertia built in.”

‘Trump will not allow the government to treat parents … as lepers’

Kennedy said the Trump administration has already made changes that would have seemed unlikely only a few years ago.

“President [Donald] Trump will not allow the government to treat parents who question vaccine orthodoxy as lepers,” Kennedy said.

He said Trump directed HHS to investigate vaccine safety, expand options for families and preserve individual choice.

“Let me be clear: You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” he said. “We’ve accomplished in 19 months things that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago.”

Kennedy pointed to the administration’s review of the childhood vaccine schedule, the reconstitution of the federal vaccine advisory panel and efforts to improve the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

“We’re fixing the VAERS system,” Kennedy said. “This is the system that was designed to fail.”

He said HHS is making the reporting system easier for doctors to use and working to improve the government’s ability to assess vaccine risks.

HHS is also researching autism and vaccine safety, and is seeking public input on how federal vaccine recommendations should be categorized, how uncertainty should be communicated and what evidence should determine the strength of a recommendation.

“We have fundamentally changed how the federal government responds to parents who question what they’ve been told about vaccines,” Kennedy said.

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‘Something happened to our kids’

Kennedy said his focus on chronic disease began years before he entered government.

“When I was a kid, we had the healthiest children in the world in our country,” he said. “Today we have the sickest — we have the highest chronic disease burden of any nation in the world.”

By 2001, Kennedy said, he had six children and was seeing health problems in schools that he had never encountered growing up.

“I saw that every school classroom was now equipped with EpiPens, which is something that I had never heard of,” he said. “They had this big list of diseases, of allergic diseases, of autoimmune diseases, of neurological diseases. … Something happened to our kids.”

Kennedy pointed to environmental exposures as a potential explanation for the rise in chronic disease and autism.

He cited a 2010 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study that he said identified 1989 as a “red line” marking the beginning of the autism epidemic. If an environmental exposure was driving the increase, he said, there should be a limited number of potential culprits that could be identified by examining what changed around that time.

“It’s finite, and it’s an easy thing to do for my agency and the public health agencies to identify exactly what those potential culprits are and then eliminate them with science,” he said. “Those are easy, basic studies to do, and yet they were never done because it was a taboo.”

“Now we’re doing that,” Kennedy added. “We’re looking at all of the potential causes.”

New food pyramid won’t ‘change anything unless we also act’

Kennedy devoted a significant portion of his speech to food policy, including nutrition education and the meals served through federal programs.

He said the administration has “flipped the food pyramid,” putting greater emphasis on protein, saturated fats, vegetables, fruits and whole grains.

But changing dietary guidance is only a first step, he said. “That’s just a document,” Kennedy said. “It’s not going to change anything unless we also act.”

Federal agencies are now aligning food subsidy programs with the new dietary approach and improving meals served in schools, hospitals and military bases.

Kennedy also said dozens of medical schools have agreed to provide at least 40 hours of nutrition education beginning in fall 2026, compared with an average of about two hours previously.

“When we came in, there was a poll that showed that 80% of medical school graduates did not feel competent to offer nutritional advice,” Kennedy said. “What are they doing?”

The administration is also targeting ultraprocessed foods and food additives.

About 70% of the U.S. food supply is ultraprocessed, Kennedy said. He noted that some food companies have adopted tactics developed by the tobacco industry to make products more appealing and addictive.

“We have, for the first time in history … people who are in many cases grotesquely obese, and at the same time are chronically malnourished, because there’s no nutrients in those chemicals,” he said.

Kennedy said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimates there are 10,000 chemicals in U.S. foods, compared with 400 in Europe.

“Many of those foods are associated with obesity, with neurological disorders, with ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], and many, many of these other injuries,” he said.

HHS has proposed requiring food manufacturers to notify the FDA when they determine that an ingredient qualifies as “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. The agency also is working to remove petroleum-based food dyes.

Kennedy also pointed to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, saying the administration is working with states on restrictions involving purchases of less nutritious foods.

“When I came in, 10% of food stamp dollars were going to sugar-sodas and 8% to candy,” Kennedy said. “If you live in this country, you should be able to get a Coca-Cola or candy anytime you want. That’s freedom of choice. The taxpayers should not be paying for it.”

He also highlighted Operation Stork Speed, an HHS initiative focused on infant formula nutrition, labeling transparency, research and FDA testing.

‘If we want good food, we need good soil’

Kennedy connected the administration’s food agenda to farming, saying HHS is working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the EPA to help farmers adopt regenerative practices and reduce reliance on chemical inputs.

“If we want good food, we need good soil,” Kennedy said.

The administration announced more than $1 billion in investments in farm modernization and regenerative agriculture earlier this year.

He said the effort includes helping farmers control weeds with fewer chemicals and reduce chemical exposures in the food supply and environment.

The administration is “already seeing progress” from its focus on nutrition, he said, citing changes in obesity and mortality rates and increased sales of what he called real food.

He also connected food to family and community life through his “The Real Food Show” cooking program.

Kennedy said the program is designed to teach people how to cook and shop for food, while encouraging them to prepare and eat meals together.

“We have a physical chronic disease epidemic in this country, but we also have a mental illness crisis,” he said. “We have a malaise.”

“One of the ways to get people to reconnect to society, to community, in this post-technology era is to get people going back to this sacred ritual that humanity has practiced since the beginning of time — of cooking a meal together and then eating it together, of creating something as a family unit,” he said.

‘These questions deserve rigorous science’

Kennedy also addressed wireless radiation and electromagnetic fields (EMFs), another issue central to CHD’s work.

“We’re bringing the same scrutiny that we brought to our food supply to technologies that shape our children’s lives,” he said.

Kennedy said HHS is examining how screen use affects children, including sleep, physical activity, social interaction and development.

On Thursday, HHS also issued a request for information seeking evidence about the potential health effects of EMFs, radiofrequency radiation and wireless technologies. The agency is asking for information on exposure standards, risk assessment, research gaps and priorities for future federal research.

HHS said the information will help the agency evaluate the state of the science, compare U.S. and international safety standards and identify areas where additional research is needed.

“We’ve opened the process to the public because these questions deserve rigorous science, transparency and answers,” Kennedy said.

‘We have no idea what the risk profile is for these products’

Kennedy returned to vaccines, arguing that federal agencies have failed for decades to conduct adequate research into the risks of products routinely given to children.

He displayed the package insert for the hepatitis B vaccine and pointed to what he described as limitations in the clinical trial supporting the product.

“The trial only had 147 infants, and they were monitored for only five days, and there was no placebo,” Kennedy said. “There’s no way any other product would get FDA approval with that few people.”

“Unfortunately, this is pretty typical,” he said. “We have no idea what the risk profile is for these products.”

He displayed a list of adverse events associated with vaccines and said many overlap with chronic illnesses that have become more common among children. He criticized VAERS, saying the system does not provide enough information to track vaccine injuries and determine how frequently they occur.

Anyone who claims it’s highly likely that most of these injuries are very rare “is not talking about science,” Kennedy said. “There’s no way for us to know this. And even if they are rare, in our country we care about rare illnesses and deaths.”

Kennedy said HHS is now conducting research that federal agencies should have undertaken years ago.

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‘I didn’t come to Washington to protect institutions from uncomfortable questions’

Kennedy acknowledged that HHS will continue to face resistance as it pursues changes in public health policy.

“Government is, in many ways, impervious to science, to facts, to change,” he said.

“We’re going to continue to face resistance,” Kennedy said. “Powerful institutions and entrenched interests do not surrender power easily. They will fight change and the people who are demanding it. They will continue to sue us and try to slow us down.”

Kennedy said the opposition is familiar territory after four decades of advocacy.

“I’ve spent 40 years in these battles,” he said. “I didn’t come to Washington to protect institutions from uncomfortable questions. I came to make those institutions answer those questions.”

He thanked scientists who continued pushing for answers despite opposition.

“All the scientists who were also willing to publish on this, willing to do the research, thank you,” Kennedy said.

“They did that so courageously because for many, probably most of them, it was career-ending,” he said. “And yet they continued to persist.”

Kennedy also praised parents who spent years researching their children’s health problems and advocating for change.

“I know the moms who gave so much … to study the science, to become experts in what happened to their child, and not only care for their children, but also care for all of our children by doing what they could to make sure that those injuries could not happen to other kids,” he said.

Kennedy said those advocates now have a voice inside the federal government.

“For many years, you’ve asked questions from outside the government, as I did,” he told the audience. “And now I have the privilege and the responsibility of leading the department that can put the full weight of the federal government behind answering those questions.”

“I intend to stay in this fight as long as I am able … [and] die with my boots on,” he said.

He added:

“I have an optimistic view of what’s going to happen. I think we can restore science. We can restore trust in our public health agencies, and we can build a health system that puts prevention at the center of healthcare.

“And I believe we can end the chronic disease epidemic and give our children a birthright that every generation owes the next: the chance to grow up healthy, strong and free from preventable disease.”

Watch RFK Jr,’s full speech, here.

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https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/rfk-jr-says-true-vaccine-risks-are-unknown-6088991?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For a generation, a handful of powerful companies captured the health agencies meant to protect us. They focused almost entirely on infectious diseases, even though those diseases were increasingly under control for decades and because of that chronic disease exploded. It was all about how to make as much money as possible by spreading fear of contagious disease, and manufacturing the science that justified it.

And chronic disease grew exponentially— asthma, allergies, autism, ADHD, hypertension, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, all of it. Now over 1.2 million people die each year mostly from preventable diseases and 90% of healthcare costs go to treating them. In 1980, 1 in 10,000 people were diagnosed with Autism; today it’s 1 in 31. Asthma was 1 in 33; today it’s 1 in 12. Food allergies were 1 in 100; today they’re 1 in 12. Type 1 diabetes was 1 in 39; today it’s 1 in 14. 1 in 5 children are obese and 1 in 4 young adult women are taking psychotropic medication.

That was the record they built and that’s a record nobody should be proud of. And the people they rewarded, people like Dr. Fauci, failed year after year and kept getting more money and more power and more fame.

Put it in perspective. Sixty percent of Americans have some form of chronic disease. As Bobby Kennedy says: “a healthy person has a thousand dreams; a sick person has just one — to simply get better.”

But what makes being sick even more painful is not knowing you’ve been lied to, not knowing that you’ve been poisoned, not knowing that your pain was preventable. Not knowing that the very things you trusted to be safe are what made you sick.

In a communist country, you know you’re not free. In America, we believed the opposite — that the government was on our side, that we had more freedom than anyone on earth, that our lives were happier and healthier. But you don’t, you can’t have freedom if you can’t get honest, accurate information? A choice between McDonald’s and Burger King, between Coke and Pepsi, between thousands of food products containing 10,000 chemicals, between one kind of water that contains glyphosate and microplastics and another also with glyphosate and microplastics – isn’t a real choice. Most of our choices were made for us.

And the worst part is when people come to love the coercion — when they’re proud to be told they can’t make their own decisions, that the experts will decide and their only job is to obey. But the experts and science itself have been captured. Our doctors along with the government agencies and the media have been bribed, conflicted, and coerced until they didn’t know or care about the truth. They’ve all become marketing arms and coconspirators for the very companies making and keeping us sick for profit.

George Carlin saw it thirty years ago. “It’s a big club,” he said, “and you ain’t in it. And it’s the same club they use to beat you over the head in their media — telling you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy.” He was right then. He’s even more right now.

That same media tells you that Bobby Kennedy is ‘dangerous.’ So let me tell you why he is dangerous, and who he’s dangerous to. He’s dangerous to all of it. The whole system, the corporate corruption, the captured government agencies, the lies, the propaganda, the censorship; and he’s been setting the record straight, delivering MAHA wins and fighting the battle of a lifetime. We are winning this culture war, by telling the truth, with transparency, by opening people’s minds that were previously shut — ending the Stockholm syndrome that made Americans grateful to their own oppressors, and giving people the tools, and the gold-standard science to start thinking for themselves and making better decisions. Because there is no freedom that matters without intellectual freedom, without free speech, without an open marketplace of ideas. And that’s been taken from us. Bobby Kennedy prayed for twenty years for the opportunity to restore it — and God gave him, and us, President Trump.

Vice President Vance said it best at the Republican [Midterm] Convention last week “I want my son to grow up healthy and strong. I want him to have access to clean water and real food. I want him to live in a country where you don’t need a PhD in chemistry to understand the ingredient list in the grocery store. I wanna live in a country where my son’s doctors answer to parents and to the Hippocratic Oath, not to a bunch of far left bureaucrats.”

We all want that for our families. And we get there with real science. Because real science is simple: innovation leads to better health — less chronic disease, less autism, less cancer. Corruption stifles innovation and scientific progress, and that’s exactly why we fell behind, that’s why we spend three times as much on health care than any other nation but achieve much worse health outcomes.

We can be a country that people travel to from all over the world, for the best treatments, the safest drugs, the healthiest food, and crops grown clean. That’s the country we’re fighting to build. And we’re just getting started. As secretary Kennedy said last week at the Republican Convention. “We have kept our promise to the American people. Today, 2 years into this administration, Americans are eating more Real Food. Real Food sales were up 8% in 2025. Americans are eating less processed food. Since President Trump took office, obesity is down by 7% after 40 years of increasing. Preliminary data that I received two days ago from CDC indicates that we have now reversed a 30-year decline in longevity.”

The upcoming midterm elections give the American people the opportunity to continue the incredible progress. Candidates like Zach Lahn in Iowa, Ken Paxton in Texas and so many others are the future of MAHA, of our growing coalition to take back our health from the dark forces that have poisoned our children. The MAHA Action PAC is proud to support Zach Lahn’s campaign with a $1 million dollar donation this week because we believe that regenerative farming, freedom and family values are the way to restore our nation’s health.

We have a tremendous lineup of guests to help us build it.

You'll hear from Cheryl Hines, Sean Stone, Dr. Sina McCullough, Dr. Jonathan Lundgren, Dr. Eric Berg, Dr. Brian Stenzler, Mary Holland and Russell Brand.

But first we are joined by Kyle Diamantas, the Acting Commissioner of the FDA. Prior to becoming Acting Commissioner, as the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Food, Mr. Diamantas led the agency’s Human Foods Program. In that role he oversaw all FDA nutrition and food safety activities. Welcome back Kyle.

[The full MAHA Media Hub from September 16, 2026 can be viewed here.]

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The fact that Peter Navarro does exist and that of all the White House staffers, he was the one who was in the very center of the action in the first Trump administration at a crucial moment in the nation’s history – and willing to invoke the ire of his colleagues to try to protect the lives of millions of Americans – seems like a stroke of luck, or an act of Providence.

“Be tough. You’re my tough guy,” President Trump told him on January 27, 2020, when he needed someone to persuade the members of the new Coronavirus Task Force to support a China travel ban.

Navarro was Trump’s top trade advisor, and a longtime China expert who shared the President’s strong beliefs that China was doing serious damage to the American economy, and to American workers.

The Chinese Communist government had just locked down the city of Wuhan, blocking people from entering and leaving the city of 11 million. On January 17, the CDC had started screening people arriving at major U.S. airports from Wuhan. But it still didn’t seem that the virus outbreak thousands of miles away would become a worldwide pandemic.

Still, Trump wanted to take action.

The next day, Navarro walked into the White House Situation Room on the ground floor of the West Wing and took a seat at the conference table.

“At high noon, directly across from me, sat a small man I did not recognize with round glasses wearing either a grin or a smirk — I could not tell which. When I looked into his eyes, he averted my gaze, and I thought to myself: This could be trouble,” Navarro recounts in his new book due out next month, Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison.

That small man with the round glasses was Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“I didn’t know Fauci from Adam,” Navarro told The MAHA Report, recalling that crucial meeting. “I immediately got into this very heated argument with him.”

Fauci said that the risk of a pandemic was very, very low.

“I argued that even granting his ‘very, very low risk’ proposition, a low probability multiplied by a catastrophic cost still buys you the insurance,” Navarro writes in the book.

Fauci insisted he’d studied travel bans many times and just kept repeating: “Travel bans don’t work.”

Navarro describes himself at that moment as “incredulous,” saying he challenged Fauci, telling him that with 20,000 people coming in every day on flights from China, arriving at Kennedy airport in New York, into LAX and O’Hare, they were taking a big risk by not doing anything.

CDC Director Robert Redfield sided with Fauci. So did HHS Secretary Alex Azar, whom Navarro hilariously refers to in the book as the “ever-preening once and future Big Pharma exec.” So did Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff who was chairing the meeting, who Navarro calls a “closet libertarian in Trump Land” saying for this reason, he was loathe to close any border.

Only Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger sided with Navarro.

At the end of the meeting, things seemed to go the wrong way.

“Mick Mulvaney said, ‘I guess there’s a consensus that travel bans don’t work.’ I said, ‘Mick, there’s no consensus!’” Navarro told The MAHA Report.

He walked out of that meeting, and that night at home, at zero dark thirty, as he describes it in the book, Navarro began drafting a memo.

Early that morning, in the cold and dark, he biked to his office at the White House and continued working on it. In the late morning, he sent it to the staff of the National Security Council with specific instructions to forward it to every principal on the Coronavirus Task Force, which included Fauci, Redfield, Azar, NIH Director Francis Collins and several other heads of agencies, along with all of their deputies and all of their analysts.

He wanted it to go to everyone before the task force met again that afternoon at 3 p.m.

The memo was four pages long and the focus was a 2-by-2 matrix showing four quadrants, each representing a different scenario.

In the first, the flights from China into the U.S. continue and the virus dies out, never becoming a worldwide pandemic. There is no cost attached to this scenario.

In the second, flights from China are stopped and the virus dies out, never becoming a pandemic. This, Navarro’s memo showed, would cost about $2.9 billion, mostly for the airlines in lost revenue and also for the tourism industry in America.

In the third scenario, the flights are stopped and the virus becomes a deadly pandemic. The losses would be $34.6 billion, he estimated.

In the fourth scenario – and this is where the hammer drops – the flights from China are not stopped and the virus becomes a deadly pandemic that spreads around the world. In this scenario, Navarro predicted in the memo that it would cost the U.S. a stunning $3.8 trillion in losses, including “the possible loss of as many as half a million American lives.”

The memo hit everyone’s inbox at noon. And it hit hard.

At 3 p.m., when Navarro headed to the Situation Room, he was blocked in the corridor and told he was not on the list.

They’d kicked him off the task force for tangling with Fauci. But it didn’t matter. Navarro had won.

Everyone including Fauci quickly got behind the travel ban and President Trump announced it two days later, on January 31. There would be no more flights from China coming into the U.S. for the foreseeable future.

The memo had changed everything, putting everyone on notice that if they didn’t get behind the travel ban, they’d be responsible for horrific losses that could have been prevented.

“I was tough with him in the meetings, but I was right,” Navarro says about Fauci.

And getting kicked off the Coronavirus Task Force didn’t stop him.

“The task force was a bunch of bureaucrats sitting on their asses. I just did stuff,” he says.

Navarro became the quartermaster of the pandemic, taking quick action to get masks, ventilators and Covid tests where they were needed, sometimes in just days – procuring a Pentagon plane to go pick up millions of swabs and getting Fred Smith’s help to deploy six FedEx planes to distribute them all over the country.

He sliced through red tape and bureaucracy, working from his stand-up desk in the White House complex.

Navarro is one of Trump’s closest aides – a trusted advisor and China hawk with a PhD in economics from Harvard. Until 2016, when he joined the Trump campaign, he was a professor of economics at the University of California-Irvine Paul Merage School of Business. He was a rare breed among American professors, warning loudly of the destruction of the American economy by communist China and authoring several books on the topic. One of them, Death by China, he made into a movie.

His latest book, Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison, is a fascinating side-by-side comparing his diary of the Covid-19 pandemic with Fauci’s, and exposing Fauci as a master manipulator, and liar.

Steve Bannon, host of The War Room on Real America’s Voice, wrote a spirited introduction to Navarrow’s book, saying no one was better positioned to say what really happened in the Trump White House in early 2020 than Navarro, calling him “the White House warrior who took Fauci on harder, earlier, and more relentlessly than anybody alive . . . . “

In the book, Navarro calls Fauci the “godfather of the pandemic” as he and the agency he ran, the NIAID, funded the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through grants to British zoologist Peter Daszak and his company EcoHealth Alliance – research that likely created SARS-CoV-2.

He knew exactly what he was doing, says Navarro, and he knew the risks.

“That guy. He’s one of the most evil people who’s ever walked the planet. And people need to know that.”

Navarro was the first person in the Trump White House to say the virus had likely come from a lab. But he goes further than just nature v. lab.

“My concern was not accidental leak,” he says. “My concern was that it might be intentional release.”

Navarro had been tough on the Chinese, and he said it’s clear now that the Chinese wanted to prevent Trump from being re-elected in November of 2020.

“If they did do it intentionally, it was a brilliant strategy, because it did help bring him down,” he says.

Navarro’s Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison is set up like a prosecution, laying out the case against Fauci.

In 2024, it was Navarro who went to prison, for defying a House subpoena and refusing to testify before the January 6th Committee, claiming executive privilege. He spent four months in the federal prison in Miami-Dade County.

“I was the only guy in for a misdemeanor,” he says. “Everyone else was a felony.”

He was also the only one who got no reduction in his sentence – a sign of the highly partisan prosecutions of Trump officials by Biden’s Department of Justice following the 2020 election.

But the tables are now turning, with the heat on Fauci as the man most responsible for a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans and over 7 million people worldwide.

“He’s in his own prison and the walls are only going to close in more and more,” says Navarro.

[Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison is due out from War Room Books, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, on October 13, 2026. It’s available for pre-orders now.]

Shop our merch store to support the MAHA Report and the MAHA movement.

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Previous IACC proposals funneled most federal research dollars to genetic research, which yielded little. According to Biology Insights, over 1,000 genes are associated with autism. If all of those caused autism, everyone would have the disorder.

The new plan acknowledges the failure of focusing on genes, writing, “Even using today’s most advanced tools, no specific genetic cause is identified in 75-85% percent of people with ASD, underscoring how much of ASD remains unexplained by identifiable genetic findings, the committee wrote.”

But even as the new plan takes shape, there’s a movement afoot to derail it. Why and by whom?

The new plan calls for defining and studying regression in autism, noting that a significant number of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder regressed in their development, losing acquired skills like the ability to walk and talk. For years, parents of children with autism have reported that their children regressed suddenly, often following vaccination, as comedian and actress Jenny McCarthy explains.

Why children with autism regress needs greater study. The IACC plan views autism as a biologically-based disability marked by a wide range of health and functional issues. It supports the current ongoing efforts while providing blueprints to fill the many gaps in crucially needed investments and calls for scaling research to meet the growing demand created by the autism epidemic.

The plan establishes timelines for research into the underlying biology of autism and developing effective treatments for the many co-morbid conditions people with autism frequently suffer, such as seizures, apraxia, mitochondrial dysfunction, gastrointestinal issues, immune dysfunction and chronic inflammation, and others.

The goal is to develop effective treatments, prevention strategies, and possible cures for autism. The plan calls for increasing communication support and assistive technology, caregiver support, and caring for aging people with autism, among other unmet needs.

And yet entrenched interests aligned with Big Pharma and old-guard public health devotees are attempting to derail the new plan, pushing to replace it with a plan that the Biden administration proposed three years ago which maintains the status quo of autism research and does little to improve the lives of people with autism.

Many of the plan’s critics are past IACC members who were not re-appointed to the IACC by Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. [The IACC is composed of 23 representatives from federal agencies and 20 public members appointed by Secretary Kennedy. IACC members voted in the plan with 26 yeas, 1 nay, and 13 abstentions.]

These critics believe that the plan has a veiled anti-vaccine focus even though vaccines are not its focus, which is decidedly on studying regression and environmental causes of autism.

There is ample evidence to warrant further inquiry into autism’s environmental causes, as Dr. James Lyons-Weiler, PhD, addresses in The Environmental and Genetic Causes of Autism.

However, one organization, the Autism Science Foundation, criticized the plan for not reflecting “scientific consensus” and called for even more dollars to be devoted to genetic research. [The director of the ASF is Alison Singer, a former IACC member.]

Secretary Kennedy has long called for a balanced approach in the search for understanding what causes autism. “This is a preventable disease,” Kennedy said at an April 2025 press conference on the autism epidemic. “We know it’s an environmental exposure; it has to be – genes do not cause epidemics . . . You need an environmental toxin.”

John Gilmore, an IACC public member and director of the Autism Action Network, praised the new plan.

“For the first time in twenty-five years we have a plan that embraces the full scope of autism with the goal of providing real help,” he said. “It’s a huge step forward and a departure from the status quo.”

Gilmore has called for the autism community and the MAHA movement to push back against the movement to derail the IACC’s plan, asking people to message their support here and politely call the White House [@212-456-1111].

Added Gilmore, “We finally have a plan that calls for rigorous analysis of what triggers autistic regression and developing treatments.”

It has been 20 years since Congress passed The Combating Autism Act. It is time to really do what Congress called for - end the autism epidemic and bring meaningful help to the autism community.

Please make those calls!

Related Reading

There is much Thoreauvian about Sean Stone’s eloquent and reflective 10 Things to Learn: Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Soul (Tucker Carlson Books/ Skyhorse, Oct.6).

At a time when some people see suffering as a software problem and the soul as a thing to optimize, Stone’s book is stubbornly old-fashioned and, for that reason, unexpectedly urgent. It’s not a self-help book — not a manual for better habits. It’s a map of what Stone calls the “gates” through which our lives ripen: falling, surrendering, crying, caring, hating, creating, sharing, loving, breathing, and laughing.

RFK Jr. ‘s foreword sets the tone. Recalling the night his father pressed Camus’s The Plague into his hands after the assassination of President Kennedy, he writes that myths do not abolish pain; they teach us how to carry it. Stone’s book reflects such wisdom. The book’s argument is simple and unsparing: technology has expanded our power without answering grief, fear, or hunger for purpose. Efficiency cannot replace awe and initiation. The work of becoming human still happens in such times a collapse, surrender, and devotion.

Stone moves with ease among traditions. Eden and the Tower of Babel sit beside Icarus, Osiris, Inanna’s descent through seven gates, the Buddha’s palace walls, Dante’s dark wood, Gatsby’s green light, Samson and Delilah, Jonah in the whale, Esther before the king, Tibetan sand mandalas, Aboriginal Dreamtime, Hamlet and the Bhagavad Gita. These are not name-drops. Each story is used as a living instrument. Lucifer hardens after the fall and remains trapped; Osiris is dismembered and becomes lord of another realm. The difference, Stone insists, is interpretation: punishment or initiation.

The book’s prose is spare, almost incantatory. Personal memoir is woven in without vanity: a childhood in the shadow of his famous filmmaker father, Oliver Stone; a midlife sense of being lost with a single, solid career or his own family; a punishing trek toward Everest base camp undertaken not to conquer a mountain but to, as he writes, “meet myself upon it”; three days in a windowless chamber at forty, candle blown out, weeping in the dark until images—birds, whales, stars—appeared on the wall. “If I could see the universe in the darkness,” he asks, “then is the universe within me?”

The chapter on hate is among the book’s bravest. Stone does not sanitize the emotion. He treats it as a fire one must sit beside: do not extinguish it, do not feed it, ask what it guards and what it mourns. Creation is framed as both gift and responsibility; Victor Frankenstein’s tragedy is not that he made a creature but that he refused to claim it. Laughter, in the final gate, is not lightness but the last freedom—the prospectors in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre finding their gold scattered as dust and laughing because there is nothing else left to do.

10 Things to Learn does not want to give you pat, linear answers. His gates are cyclical. One falls, surrenders, cries, and falls again. Being human is “not a destination,” Stone writes. “It is a daunting quest.”

Stone writes as someone who has walked the mystic’s peripatetic path—films, poems, documentaries, interviews—and come home to the oldest, most resonant stories because there is so much alive in them that deserves revisiting in a time of the algorithm and scrolling for the quick fix.

In the closing essay, “The Thread,” Stone returns to Anansi winning the tales from the sky and to Theseus in the labyrinth: the cord does not tell you where to go; it reminds you that even when the mind is designed to forget the path, you remain connected. Myth, in Stone’s telling, is not ornament. It is the yarn that gives context to confusion, meaning to sorrow, and a way back when the maze is the mind itself.

Stone wants us to recognize ourselves in the myths he reflects on through the book: Achilles in our rage, Hamlet in our doubt, the fool laughing at the king and the king being laughed at.

Stone’s book will not fix your life. It will remind you that falling, crying, hating, loving, and laughing are not detours from being human—they are the way through. The old stories are still the best company we have for the work all of us must do.

[Sean Stone’s 10 Things to Learn: Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Soul (Tucker Carlson Books/ Skyhorse) is available for pre-order, here. It publishes October 6.]

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When news reports announce measles spreading close to home, it is natural for parents to feel concerned. In these moments, the conversation usually focuses on a single solution: the vaccine.

But parents deserve the full story, including the cause of the dramatic decline in measles deaths, the critical role of nutrition, and whether vaccinated individuals can transmit measles. Looking closely at the evidence helps families move past fear-provoking headlines and make informed health decisions.

What Is Measles?

Measles is an acute respiratory infection caused by a virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It spreads through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

Early symptoms resemble a standard cold or flu:

• Runny nose

• Dry Cough

• Red, watery eyes (conjunctivitis)

• High Fever

Within two to three days, tiny white spots may appear inside the mouth. Around the fourth day, a flat red rash typically emerges on the head and face and spreads downward over the body.

While serious complications like pneumonia or brain inflammation (encephalitis) can occur, the vast majority of healthy, well-nourished children recover within a week to ten days.

What Caused the Drop in Measles Deaths?

During the 1800s, measles was deeply feared. It swept through American cities every few years under crowded, unsanitary conditions, leading to significant mortality among malnourished children. In severe outbreaks among high-risk or institutionalized children, case fatality rates could reach up to 20 percent (20,000 deaths for every 100,000 infected children), primarily caused by secondary bacterial pneumonia and severe diarrhea.

Yet by 1960, official United States vital statistics reveal that measles mortality had already plummeted by 98 percent, dropping to roughly 0.2 deaths per 100,000 people. Among reported cases, the risk of death had fallen to approximately 0.1 percent (1 in 1,000 infected), or roughly 0.01 percent (1 in 10,000) when accounting for estimated total unreported infections.

What drove this massive decline in mortality?

It wasn’t antibiotics.

Penicillin was not widely available until 1944. Yet, by that time, measles mortality had already fallen by nearly 90 percent from its turn-of-the-century peak, according to official United States vital statistics.

It wasn’t the measles vaccine either.

The first measles vaccine was not licensed until 1963, which was after the 98 percent drop in deaths had occurred. The same year, Massachusetts recorded zero measles deaths, and Washington state recorded a rate of just 0.3 per 100,000

In a 1962 paper published in the American Journal of Public Health, Dr. Alexander Langmuir, the CDC’s Chief of Epidemiology, described measles as a “self-limiting infection of short duration, moderate severity, and low fatality.”

Public health researchers widely attributed the pre-vaccine decline to cleaner drinking water, modern sanitation, better housing and hygienic practices, and improved childhood nutrition.

The Role of Nutrition

As early as 1932, Dr. J. B. Ellison reported that well-nourished children rarely died or experienced severe complications from measles. Proper nutrition is vital partly because infection triggers inflammation, which can quickly deplete the body’s nutrient stores and hinder the immune system’s ability to fight the infection.

Vitamin A

Vitamin A (retinol) is essential for maintaining mucous membranes and adequate immune response. Research in Pediatrics reported that measles rapidly lowers blood retinol levels. And lower levels correlate directly with higher fevers, longer hospital stays, and severe complications like pneumonia and death. Underscoring that link, a 2020 article in Vaccines noted that 92 percent of hospitalized measles cases in the U.S. were low in vitamin A.

As far back as the 1930s, administering cod liver oil (rich in vitamin A) cut measles mortality in hospitalized children by roughly 58 percent.

In 1993, a meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that vitamin A supplementation for hospitalized patients was associated with an approximate 60 percent reduction in death overall and an approximate 90 percent reduction in death among infants.

The researchers concluded, “Vitamin A supplements should be given to all measles patients…whether or not they have symptoms of vitamin A deficiency.”

A separate 1993 meta-analysis in the British Medical Journal reported a 70 percent reduction in mortality following vitamin A supplementation.

Vitamin A is so effective at reducing mortality and complications from measles that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend supplementation for hospitalized children. The World Health Organization recommends vitamin A supplementation for every child with measles, regardless of whether they were deficient beforehand.

Vitamin C and Other Micronutrients

High-dose ascorbic acid (vitamin C) also has a long history of documented clinical use. In 1949, Dr. Fred R. Klenner reported in Southern Medicine and Surgery that therapeutic doses of vitamin C led to rapid symptom resolution.

Vitamin C supports white blood cell function and tissue repair, protecting against secondary pneumonia. Key nutrients like zinc and vitamin D provide essential immune support as well.

Vaccine Gets the Credit

Despite the dramatic pre-vaccine drop in measles mortality and the documented power of nutrition, public perception shifted in the late 1950s as a vaccine was developed.

At that time, measles was not perceived as a serious disease in America. The Surgeon General’s information specialists said measles was “often welcomed as a guarantee of lifetime immunity,” and people viewed it as a “trivial” disease of childhood.

However, as word spread that a vaccine was in development, the media began emphasizing the severity of measles.

The New York Times reported that measles struck an estimated one million Americans annually and rendered victims vulnerable to secondary infections. CBS aired a broadcast titled “The Taming of a Virus” that strategically detailed the mortality of measles in West Africa where it killed 1 in 5 children.

While the virus did infect millions in America, official records show the death rate was already down to 0.2 per 100,000 (0.0002 percent of the population).

Regardless, when the vaccine was licensed in 1963, it was heralded by the news and medical journals as necessary and able to wipe out measles within a couple of years. The Times ran a front-page headline declaring, “2 Measles Vaccines Licensed; U.S. Sees End of Disease in 1965.”

But the real-world rollout has encountered unexpected problems.

Can Vaccinated Individuals Spread Measles?

Public messaging often implies that measles outbreaks are driven exclusively by the unvaccinated. However, medical literature and public health records show that outbreaks regularly occur in highly vaccinated populations:

• Illinois (1984): The CDC reported measles spreading through a school and concluded that “transmission of measles can occur within a school population with a documented immunization level of 100%.”

• Corpus Christi, Texas (1985): An outbreak occurred in a high school where over 99 percent of students were vaccinated and more than 95 percent had laboratory-confirmed immunity, leading researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine to conclude that outbreaks persist in near-universally vaccinated settings.

• Montana (1985): An outbreak of 137 cases erupted despite a 98.7 percent documented vaccination rate.

• Colorado (1988): A college outbreak of 84 measles cases occurred in spite of over 98 percent of students having documented immunity.

• Quebec, Canada (1989): Vaccination coverage in the outbreak area was reported to be 99 percent.

During the 1980s, measles cases in the U.S. rose dramatically, with vaccinated individuals accounting for approximately 30 percent of reported infections, according to a 1994 review in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The review concluded that as more people are vaccinated, “measles becomes a disease of immunized persons.”

Public health officials realized that artificial immunity from a single-dose vaccine faded over time, which led to the introduction of a two-dose schedule in 1989.

Recent studies have analyzed whether two doses prevent transmission. An August 2026 meta-analysis in Expert Review of Vaccines evaluated 890 vaccinated individuals who contracted measles. Researchers reported that 70 of them (7.9 percent) transmitted the virus to others, generating 812 downstream measles cases.

Nearly one-third (31.4 percent) of those who transmitted the virus had received the full two-dose series, leading researchers to conclude that fully vaccinated individuals “can contribute to outbreaks.”

Furthermore, vaccinated people who spread the disease rarely presented with textbook symptoms. Only 36.8 percent met the clinical case definition, and some never developed a rash. Because these cases often go undiagnosed, the researchers stated actual transmission among vaccinated individuals may be higher than currently documented.

Considerations of the Live Attenuated Measles Vaccine

The measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine uses a live, attenuated (weakened) virus designed to replicate inside the recipient’s body to trigger an immune response. Because the virus is live, it carries biological considerations:

Vaccine-induced Measles

Medical authorities acknowledge that the vaccine virus can cause a modified form of measles. While widely considered non-transmissible, institutions like the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia note that transmission may be possible. In the medical literature, documented reactions to vaccine-strain measles range from mild fever to severe neurological compromise.

A 2022 case report documented vaccine-associated encephalitis (brain inflammation) in an immunocompromised child who was “previously healthy” at her one-year well-child visit before she received the first dose of the MMR vaccine.

In a landmark 1999 case report in Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers performed genetic sequencing on brain tissue from a child who developed fatal measles inclusion-body encephalitis after vaccination. The viral sequences in the brain were confirmed to be identical to the vaccine strain.

Furthermore, the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) concluded that the evidence convincingly supports a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and encephalitis in individuals with underlying immune vulnerabilities.

Viral-Strain Infection & Possible Connection to Chronic Disease

Parents are routinely told that attenuated viruses clear the body within days or weeks. However, studies show the vaccine-strain virus can shed in urine for weeks after injection.

Additionally, vaccine-strain RNA has been detected in the white blood cells of some individuals with ulcerative colitis and some children with autism, according to a 2000 article in Digestive Diseases and Sciences.

These findings raise important questions about whether persistent viral fragments can contribute to lingering inflammation and subsequent chronic illness.

Long-Term Health Benefits of Natural Measles

Recovering from wild measles provides durable, lifelong protection that does not require booster doses. Epidemiological studies have also observed several long-term health benefits associated with natural childhood recovery from measles:

• Lower rates of allergic conditions

• Reduction in adult risk for Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas

• Reduced death from heart disease and stroke

• Stronger and longer-lasting antibodies in babies whose mothers recovered from wild measles

Public health should be built on transparency and access to all historical and scientific information so families can review the data themselves and make informed decisions.

[For additional information, the author recommends Dissolving Illusions by Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk.]

SUMMARY:

• Mortality Plunged Before Vaccines: Long before the 1963 vaccine or antibiotics, U.S. measles deaths fell by 98 percent due to improved sanitation, drinking water, living conditions, and better nutrition.

• Nutrition Drives Defense: Adequate nourishment, especially vitamin A, cuts measles mortality by 60 to 90 percent alongside vitamin C, which provides critical immune resilience.

• Vaccinated Individuals Can Still Transmit: Measles repeatedly occurs in highly vaccinated populations, and recent research confirms that vaccinated individuals can spread the virus without displaying classic symptoms.

• Risks of Live-Strain Viral Persistence: The live attenuated vaccine can cause vaccine-strain infections and may persist in tissues and white blood cells, potentially contributing to chronic inflammation or neurological complications

Dr. Sina McCullough holds a Ph.D. in Nutritional Science and a B.S. in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior from UC Davis. She is the author of Hands Off My Food! and Beyond Labels, and co-host of the Beyond Labels podcast. A former Director of R&D for a supplement company and lecturer at UC Davis, she now focuses on investigative reporting and empowering families to reclaim their health sovereignty. Learn more at drsinamccullough.com.

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By Tony Lyons

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tony Lyons is an attorney and president and publisher at Skyhorse Publishing, publisher of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s, new runaway bestseller, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.” Below is the publisher’s note Lyons wrote in December 2021, and which appears on page xii of the book.

Complex scientific and moral problems are not resolved through censorship of dissenting opinions, deleting content from the internet or defaming scientists and authors who present information challenging to those in power.

Censorship leads instead to greater distrust of government institutions and large corporations.

Read more

I’m 72 years old and for 70 years of my life I would have bet any amount of money that I would not be addressing a Republican convention.

The irony of my presence here is inescapable. I attended my first Democratic convention in 1960, when I was six years old – and I attended most of the conventions, the Democratic conventions, after that. And I spoke as a keynote speaker in many of them.

I grew up in a Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt, of my uncle John Kennedy, of my father, Robert Kennedy. And ours was a party of strong principles, of clear policies, and an inspiring, idealistic vision for America.

My uncle ran on a platform of tax cuts, strong defense, and fighting communism. Does that sound familiar?

The Democrats of that era stood with labor and working people and the American middle class. Nearly every cop and firefighter was a Democrat.

Our party was a champion of the Bill of Rights and particularly for unbridled free speech. It was wary of centralized government power and corporate privilege and secret intelligence agencies.

My uncle and father understood the connection between free markets and functional democracy. They stood firmly against crony capitalism on the right. and socialism on the left. They were all for competition, for meritocracy, and for excellence, which they thought should be a universal aspiration for Americans.

My father and uncles had served in World War II, and they understood the difference between ‘forever wars’ that they opposed and wars to protect our national security, which they believed we should never hesitate to defend.

My family played critical roles in building NIH and the CDC into centers of gold standard science that transformed America into this relentless dynamo of international research. They promoted physical fitness and they protected women’s sports. My uncle, Ted Kennedy, wrote Title IX, which, because he wanted to make sure that women, real women, were able to have a safe and guaranteed spot in college sports.

And they stood with Israel as the bulwark of democracy – and as a beacon for press and religious freedoms, a haven from oppression.to gays and women and ethnic and religious minorities, amidst a regional sea of intolerance, of misogyny, of child marriage, of human slavery, and of ethnic and religious genocide. They saw Israel as America’s most critical frontline ally in fighting the toxic ideology of Islamism, which by its own accounts is waging an existential war against our country and against Western liberal democracy. It’s an ideology that has subjugated, impoverished, and tyrannized and tortured the people of Palestine and the people of Iran, and they openly promise to do the same to us.

Democrats opposed government coercion, defended individual rights, believed that government should give Americans information, good information, and then trust them to make up their own minds.

Democrats and labor leaders fought fiercely in my generation to stop illegal immigration at the border. During Covid, I watched the Democratic party turn against every one of its essential values, its principles and all the policies that define my party.

Democrats turned away from gold standard research and blindly defended industry-sponsored, agenda-driven science written by corrupt and captive regulatory agencies.

And the Democrats, which were once the champions of the American Constitution, systematically obliterated the Bill of Rights – and particularly beginning with the First Amendment, under the guise of combating misinformation, Democrats censored hundreds of scientists and physicians who questioned the government’s dubious Covid pronouncements and orthodoxies.

Thirty-seven hours after President Biden took the oath of office, he ordered Facebook and Instagram to remove my accounts in order to prevent public debate.

I’m not complaining about what happened to me, but it was a bad thing for our country. Democrats obliterated the second leg of the First Amendment, the guaranteed right of assembly, by social distancing regulations that were completely un-science based. Democrats violated the third leg of the First Amendment, the freedom to worship. They closed every church in our country for a year. Who could imagine that would have ever happened? And they kept open the liquor stores and the big box stores as essential businesses.

Democrats torpedoed the Seventh Amendment -- right to jury trial -- by giving liability shields to the giant pharmaceutical companies. No matter how negligent they were, no matter how reckless, no matter how toxic the ingredients, no matter how grievous your injury, you could not sue them.

Democrats violated the Fifth Amendment by shutting down three million businesses with no due process and no just compensation.

Democrats shut down the Fourth Amendment, protection from unlawful searches and seizures, by forcing Americans to disclose their medical information before they could exercise their constitutional rights.

In a single year, my party obliterated 250 years of constitutional guarantees.

The only bill of right that they left unscathed was the Second Amendment -- and probably only because there is a Second Amendment.

And then the party of “My Body, My Choice” forced citizens to wear masks and to submit to invasive and intrusive medical interventions against their own wills. The party of “Me Too”-- remember that we were all supposed to listen to women and to believe women -- cruelly silenced the voices of tens of thousands of mothers who believed that their children had suffered vaccine injuries.

The Democrats declared war on women’s sports, effectively destroying Title IX.

The Democrats condemned meritocracy openly and celebrated mediocrity.

The Democratic Party became the party of elites, labeling working Americans as ‘deplorables.’

Democrats cultivated deep ties with Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, Big Food, Big Insurance, and the mainstream media.

They embraced policies that divided Americans along racial lines.

They abolished my uncle’s physical fitness test because they said that competition was bad for children.

Democrats abandoned all of these values and all of their traditional values, offering Americans only one policy – one policy that they stood for, the unbridled sociopathic and blind hatred of a single man, Donald J. Trump.

And they were so confident that Trump hatred alone was sufficient to win elections, that they abandoned accountability and made our government a predatory organism of monumental incompetence and corruption.

The Democrats dismantled the public integrity safeguards and opened the floodgates to thieves and fraudsters who fleece the American medical regulatory agencies for $100 billion annually during every year of the Biden administration. They somehow lost 360,000 children and they turned our federal government into the biggest childhood trafficking operation in world history.

The Democratic Party, in short, lost its way.

I mourn the fact that neither my father nor my uncle would recognize the Democratic Party of today.

It struck me that this was no longer about left and right, it was about sane and insane. It was about common sense and communism.

In April 2023, I ran for president, hoping to summon my party back to its bedrock values. But the Democratic Party had lost faith in American voters and utterly, ironically, lost faith in American democracy. They were convinced that they would lose the ballot box, they couldn’t win, and so they unveiled a lawfare strategy to prevent an election from occurring.

They sued every candidate who dared to run against Joe Biden. And then attempted to remove us all from the ballot. A lot of you think that the lawfare was just against Donald Trump. It was mainly against him. But they sued Dean Phillips. They sued Marianne Williamson. They sued Cornel West. They sued Donald Trump, 50 times in 38 states, to remove him from the ballots. And they sued me in 12 states to remove me from ballots where I had legally qualified.

And then, this is almost comical, after I endorsed President Trump and I tried to remove myself from the ballot so that he could have my votes, they sued to keep me on the ballot.

I’m not joking.

Here was the Democratic Party, that in my youth … the biggest issue that we had, that my father and my uncle fought for, was voting rights, and particularly in the southern states, that guaranteed that every American had a right to cast a ballot. And here’s that same party, 60 years later, using all of its ingenuity and all of its power to make sure that Americans could not vote for the candidates that they wanted to vote for. They excluded me from the debates. They canceled the primaries.

The Democratic Party changed the rules to make sure I could not win, and neither could the other people who were running as Democrats, no matter how many votes we got. And for the first time in history, they canceled their own convention.

No voter ever cast a primary ballot for Kamala Harris. No elected delegate was ever consulted. A party of ‘no kings’ simply anointed a queen.

Hand-picked by secretive party elites – nobody even knows who they were – they’re just faceless guys with lanyards who are calling all the shots from the upper decks of that convention center — and nobody can see their faces anymore than you can see the face of the people up there. But that’s who was making the decision and then they canceled the convention and they held a coronation.

The day that President Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, within three hours of his shooting, he called me and asked me for a meeting. And during the series of talks that followed, I realized that everything that I had heard about President Trump and everything I believed about him from the mainstream media was a lie. Everything.

I discovered a self-effacing man of superior intelligence, of empathy and compassion, with an encyclopedic grasp of the issues and in molecular detail, and most of all a near reckless courage that challenged vested interests and official orthodoxies.

I found a man who cared deeply about transparency in government, who believed in protecting free speech more than anything, and the entire United States Constitution.

We talked about lowering drug prices, supporting farmers and ranchers, standing up for working Americans, restoring law and order, and protecting public safety and security –and national safety as well.

We talked about ending corporate influence, unraveling the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, and restoring gold-standard science and public trust.

We talked about ending fraud, waste and abuse – and, most importantly to me, we talked about ending the chronic disease epidemic and restoring the health of our children.

President Trump told me that he wanted safe food available to all Americans. He wanted to end chronic disease. He wanted it to restore our kids’ health. He found it unacceptable that this country pays two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden ever recorded.

These conversations changed the course of my campaign and my life. I realized that many of the foundational values of the Democratic Party had found a new home and it was called the Republican Party.

Now, out of a sense of fairness, after my conversation with President Trump, I tried to have the same conversation with Kamala Harris. Do you think she would agree to meet with me? Did she even pick up the telephone? So, on August 23, 2024, I suspended my campaign and I endorsed President Trump. Later that day, on stage at the ‘Turning Point’ rally in Arizona, I met President Trump – and that moment would never have happened without my friend Charlie Kirk.

Charlie played a critical and indispensable role at bringing me and President Trump together. In fact, it was something that he was trying to do for almost a year, the last year of my campaign. And today, on the first anniversary of his assassination, I can’t stand here without thinking about him. Charlie believed that people from all different political traditions could find common ground in their love of country. That we were, in this age of algorithms driving us all apart and creating this terrible, destructive polarization, the only way that we were gonna rescue our country is if we started talking to each other and having congenial conversations. And he helped build the bridge that President Trump and I walked across that day. And I like to believe that Charlie is looking down on all of us now. And seeing the seeds that he planted.

That afternoon, President Trump and I stood together in front of thousands of Americans. We shook hands, and we made a promise to the American people. Together, we promised to make America healthy again.

Some of my Democratic friends told me that I was a fool for trusting President Trump. And so I want to make the record clear right now: President Trump has kept every single promise that he made to me without exception.

And we have kept our promise to the American people: Today, two years into this administration, Americans are eating more real food. Real food sales were up 8% in 2025. Americans are eating less processed food. Since President Trump took office, obesity is down by 7% – after 40 years of increasing.

And this is best of all: preliminary data that I received two days ago from CDC indicates that we have now reversed a 30-year decline in longevity.

President Trump has ended nine wars; he’s restored competency to our government; he’s restored public faith; he’s restored America’s leadership across the globe; and I am so grateful to God for giving our country a leader like this.

And I’m grateful to President Trump for including me in his administration, giving me a place in this extraordinary revolution that is happening in our country, where we’re going to restore American democracy and restore the America that my uncle and father believed in, the exemplary nation respected and emulated across the globe.

We are making America healthy again. It’s up to you now. We need to elect a Republican Congress to keep this momentum going. Let’s go out and do that.

God bless you. God Bless America.

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By Peter Navarro

I fought Anthony Fauci across a White House table over the China travel ban, lockdowns, masks, hydroxychloroquine, vaccines, and boosters.

Yet one of the most damning pieces of evidence I have ever seen against the man did not surface until six years later, when Senator Rand Paul released Fauci’s private pandemic diary.

It is an entry dated August 15, 2021. The Biden White House was preparing to roll out a broad COVID booster campaign. Behind closed doors, Fauci knew there was a problem.

The evidence was thin.

The case for boosting everybody was weak.

And the administration needed a message.

Here is what Fauci wrote:

“If we are too precise we will be called out because we cannot back it with data.”

Read that again.

This was not Anthony Fauci struggling heroically with scientific uncertainty. This was the President’s Chief Medical Adviser admitting, in private, that the government could not support its public booster message with the data.

Worse, the decision was already moving ahead.

Fauci described himself and the White House medical team as trying to “fashion [a] coherent message to justify the announcement” that boosters would be offered broadly.

The policy came first.

The justification came afterward.

And Fauci knew exactly where the scientific weakness lay.

In the same diary entry, he identified the real question: Did everybody need another shot, or only the elderly and those with underlying conditions?

That was not some question raised later by “anti-vaxxers.” Fauci himself was asking it privately before the universal campaign rolled forward.

Yet instead of insisting that the government stop, gather the evidence, and tell Americans precisely what was known and unknown, Fauci helped fashion the message.

His own words are devastating: precision was dangerous because precision could expose that the government “cannot back it with data.”

Five weeks later, the government’s own scientific advisers effectively vindicated the concern Fauci had privately recorded—but publicly ignored.

On September 17, 2021, the FDA’s outside advisory committee voted 16–2 against Pfizer’s request to give a booster to everyone sixteen and older.

Then, when the proposal was narrowed to older and high-risk Americans, the same committee overwhelmingly supported it.

Same experts. Same meeting. Same evidence.

No to everybody.

Yes to those most at risk.

That was precisely the distinction Fauci had privately identified.

So what did Fauci do when independent experts arrived publicly at essentially the same conclusion he had privately entertained?

He did not celebrate science working as intended.

His diary records that he was “disappointed.”

When FDA officials moved toward the narrower authorization, Fauci called it “a major mistake.”

That tells you what this story is really about.

It is not simply that Anthony Fauci got a medical question wrong. Scientists get things wrong.

It is that the answer Fauci’s Medical Industrial Complex wanted had begun to outrank the evidence.

A recommendation says: Here is what we know. Here is what we do not know. Here are the risks and benefits. You and your physician decide.

A mandate says: Take the product or pay a price — perhaps your job, your military career, your education, or your ability to participate in ordinary life.

The second requires stronger evidence than the first.

During COVID, Washington repeatedly moved in the opposite—and authoritarian—direction.

The more coercive the policy became, the simpler the message became.

Age disappeared.

Comorbidities disappeared.

Natural immunity was pushed aside.

Known concerns such as myocarditis in younger men became inconvenient complications to a universal slogan. Miscarriage risk in the first trimester—mum, not Mom, was the word.

Everybody vaccinate.

Everybody boost.

That is not informed consent.

That is compliance.

My forthcoming book, Why Fauci MUST Rot in Prison: His Diary. My Diary. Your Verdict, puts Fauci’s private diary beside the public record and beside my own contemporaneous record from inside the first Trump White House.

Again and again, Private Tony knew things Public Tony did not tell you.

Private Tony had doubts.

Public Tony had certainty.

Private Tony saw complications.

Public Tony sold slogans.

And when the evidence threatened the slogan, the problem became how to “fashion” the message.

That is why this story matters to the MAHA movement far beyond Anthony Fauci.

MAHA must break the machinery that allowed one government official, surrounded by an obedient medical establishment, Big Pharma, compliant media, and censorious technology companies, to convert unsettled science into government dogma.

Science requires dissent.

Medicine requires individual judgment.

Informed consent requires the whole truth.

And no government official should ever again be permitted to hide uncertainty from the people while privately worrying that telling them the precise truth would expose that he could not “back it with data.”

Peter Navarro served as Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy in the first Trump White House, where he fought Fauci from the first days of the pandemic, and now serves as Senior Counselor to the President. His new book, Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison: His Diary. My Diary. Your Verdict, with a foreword by Stephen K. Bannon, will be published by War Room Books/ Skyhorse on October 13.]

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Before she became a farmer, educator, or advocate, Merinoff was a sculptor, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan and a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College in New York. She credits that artistic training with teaching her to observe closely, imagine what does not yet exist, and then make it tangible.

“As an artist, you learn to build things that weren’t there before,” she said.

Where the Vision Took Shape

The turning point in Merinoff’s life came during her roughly ten years working for Heifer International, a non-profit focused on creating sustainable farming and addressing poverty and hunger.

Traveling through Asia, Africa, and South and Central America, Merinoff encountered families living in extreme poverty, but she also witnessed what happened when those same families received livestock, agricultural training and practical skills: they could grow food and generate income. Through Heifer’s “Passing on the Gift” model, recipients commit to extending the opportunity to another family traditionally by passing on offspring from the livestock they receive, along with the skills and knowledge they have gained.

She watched communities move from profound scarcity toward stability and, in some cases, abundance.

“We saw that poverty can be ended,” Merinoff said. “There are answers to questions. You just need to have the will and the skill to put them in.”

Those experiences eventually sent her home asking a different question: in a country surrounded by abundance, how much of our own ability to feed ourselves, make things, and solve practical problems have we lost?

Merinoff began to look at her own life differently. After more than a dozen trips abroad, she’d return from communities where people had practically nothing to American grocery stores overflowing with brightly packaged food. She realized that, despite all that abundance, she lacked many of the basic skills she had witnessed abroad.

“I was a sculptor,” she said. “I didn’t grow anything… I literally couldn’t take care of myself.”

Eventually, that realization became impossible to ignore.

“I can build,” she remembers thinking. “So go build something.”

Building Meadows Bee

In 2006, Merinoff purchased land in Vermont and founded Meadows Bee Farm, devoted to teaching young people about ecological farming and farming arts.

She wasn’t interested in simply producing food for other people. She wanted to learn how to do things herself and then teach others.

The farm expanded into livestock, gardens, and food production, and the community ecosystem began to flourish as she helped revive an old community store and a post office and started a café, a farmers market, and a teaching kitchen.

Over time, her attention increasingly turned toward children, a focus that now feels especially personal as the mother of two adult children, Leslie and Andrew, and a new grandmother of two.

The reason, she says, is simple: children still want to try things.

Show a child how to milk a cow, turn that milk into yogurt, pick berries and make a smoothie, Merinoff says, and the child doesn’t just want to sit there and observe. The child wants to participate.

That insight became the foundation of Meadows Bee’s Young Farmers Program, an experiential curriculum in which children earn badges by demonstrating skills in subjects ranging from livestock and gardening to cooking, sewing and homesteading.

Merinoff intentionally made the badges difficult to earn.

A child who completes one should know, she says, “that they earned this.”

Her latest project is Young Farmer Starts, designed to take her desire to teach the next generation beyond Vermont. The national program begins with hands-on experiences that families, farms, homesteads, and schools can replicate, connecting children with farming, food, and practical skills. The mission of Young Farmer Starts is to build “capable, confident kids,” as Merinoff’s ultimate goal is to help return home economics to American schools.

“My ultimate goal is to get every fourth grader in America to know how to make chicken soup.”

It sounds modest, but for Merinoff, it represents something bigger.

A pot of soup can teach children where food comes from, how ingredients become a meal, how to nourish themselves, and how to stretch food economically. More importantly, it gives them something modern childhood increasingly lacks: competence in the kitchen.

“Get children to start using their hands,” she said.

Nearly 20 years later, Meadows Bee has grown well beyond a small family operation. A team that includes farm and garden, livestock, and education managers, along with teachers, interns, and WWOOF volunteers, keeps the farm and its programming running. Merinoff says she deliberately built it that way, so it could continue without her daily presence.

Creating Change

Merinoff and her husband of 40 years, Charles, who is chairman of their family business, Breakthru Beverage Group, a national wine and spirits distributor, frequently had the opportunity to meet with policymakers. Merinoff began using that access to raise issues outside of the beverage business, particularly agriculture, the PRIME Act, and her longstanding interest in bringing home economics, farming, and shop skills back into American education.

Over time, she became less interested in political affiliation and more interested in whether policies actually produced results.

“I cannot call myself a Democrat,” she remembers concluding. “I can only call myself someone who supports this policy.”

That philosophy eventually brought her into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign orbit and then into the organizations that grew out of the MAHA movement.

At MAHA Center, Merinoff helped build the organization’s structure and launch the Chiropractic Hub. The hub now has its own executive director, committees, a website and eight areas of focus spanning education and research. It is also supporting H.R. 539, legislation intended to expand Medicare access to chiropractic services, which Merinoff says currently has 174 congressional co-sponsors.

Further, Merinoff is deeply involved with the Rural Health Transformation Program. Over the past year, Merinoff has worked with governors and state officials, including West Virginia Secretary of Health Dr. Arvin Singh, to identify ways the program can support rural communities. She says the MAHA Center team has now submitted 25 vendor applications connected with that work.

She is currently helping build additional health and food-focused hubs at MAHA Center, while participating in media, roundtables and events designed to move MAHA priorities from ideas into implementation.

Observe. Learn. Participate. Build something.

Yet even as the scale of Merinoff’s work has expanded from a Vermont farm to Washington, her approach has remained consistent: observe closely, imagine something better, and then get to work building it.

“If you have anything wrong that you don’t like about this country,” she said, “then go participate and try to fix it.”

That insistence on participation is the thread connecting her life’s journey. She has taught children to use their hands rather than simply watch. She has encouraged families to understand where their food comes from. She has brought farmers into conversations with lawmakers and pushed citizens to read legislation, identify what they want changed, and advocate for it themselves.

And she has little patience with the idea that meaningful change is someone else’s responsibility.

“Come up with the one thing you want to change,” she said. “And then advocate for it.”

During our conversation, Merinoff lightheartedly described herself as the “MAHA grandma” surrounded by a generation of MAHA moms. The description made me smile, but the more I listened to her, the more fitting it seemed.

There is something uniquely inspiring about the way Merinoff moves through the world. She sees potential in a neglected building, an unused piece of land, a child who has never milked a cow, a policy that has stalled for years, and immediately begins thinking about what it could become. Her instinct is not merely to criticize what is broken, but to gather people, teach skills, create tangible solutions, and invite others to join her in the work.

That creativity may be one of her greatest contributions to MAHA. Movements need policy experts and advocates, but they also need builders: people capable of looking beyond what exists and imagining what is possible.

Today, the materials are different. Instead of clay or stone, she’s working with farms, schools, communities, legislation, and ideas. But the artistic impulse remains the same.

After speaking with Merinoff, it is difficult not to come away energized. As a mother, I am grateful that someone with her imagination, persistence, and decades of experience is helping shape the future of the MAHA movement.

Perhaps, most importantly, she is still asking the question that has driven her work for decades:

What can we build together?

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