Joel Salatin, the self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer,” who runs Polyface Farm in the hills of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, calls this surge the “homestead tsunami.”

Nationwide, events devoted to homesteading and self-sufficient living are growing, including the Homesteaders of America Conference in Virginia and the Modern Homesteading Conference in Idaho.

In August, Salatin and Polyface Farm will host the Rogue Conference, an annual event held at a different location each year that emphasizes regenerative farming, local food systems, and food sovereignty, and embraces activism against what Salatin calls “cumbersome regulations.”

He wrote a book released in 2024 called Homestead Tsunami: Good for Country, Critters, and Kids. It highlights the trend of Americans moving to the country for homesteading and serves as a template for people interested in becoming more self-sufficient.

In mid-June, in the hills of Amish Country in eastern Ohio, Salatin spoke about why homesteading is on the rise.

“There’s been a real disconnect between the younger generation and where their food comes from,” he said.

“People have an intuition that there is more opportunity in the country than in the city to be self-sufficient,” he added. “The problem is, we are now several generations removed from commonly knowing how to gut a chicken, tap a maple tree, and plant tomatoes. When you make a change from your routine in life, you need support, and that is why the homesteading and sustainable living events are important, and that’s why I do what I do.”

The homesteading movement gained momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic when seed companies sold out, canning supplies disappeared from shelves, and backyard chicken flocks grew.

Online searches for sourdough recipes and canning methods spiked.

What began as a reaction to empty supermarket shelves and lockdowns has evolved into a sustained cultural shift.

Amid the rolling green hills of eastern Ohio’s Amish country, the Seed to Spoon Summit teaches attendees to return to their grandparents’ roots and become more self-sufficient.

Exhibitors and experts offer instruction on everything from beekeeping, cheesemaking, butchering, canning, and gardening to bread making, soil care, meat processing, and growing microgreens, among other skills and tasks.

Launched in 2022 and originally called the Food Independence Summit, the gathering was co-founded by John Miller, owner of Superb Canning, and Marcus Wengerd, owner of Berlin Seeds. Both businesses are nestled in a region where Amish and Mennonite farms dot the landscape along roads traveled by horse-drawn buggies as well as automobiles.

Widely known as an Amish Country tourist mecca, Holmes County and neighboring Tuscarawas County are also teeming with entrepreneurs focused on sustainable living products and services.

Self-sufficient living here is a way of life for both Amish and “English”—the Amish term for those who do not belong to the Amish community.

Miller and Wengerd changed the name to “Seed to Spoon” because it “captures the entire journey of food—from planting and growing to preserving and eating,” Miller said.

“The new name also clearly communicates the deeper goal of empowering families and communities to become less dependent on fragile, centralized food systems,” Wengerd added.

“This is more than just a conference; it’s a movement by many who want to be healthier,” Miller said.

Homegrown food is one of the keys to healthier communities, Wengerd said.

“Seed is the currency of our planet. If we don’t have seed, then we go hungry. And if we don’t properly preserve what we harvest, that food will go to waste. And it all starts with healthy soil,” Wengerd said.

Miller noted they put together the first summit in 2022 in six weeks.

“We sought as many experts and influencers in sustainable living as we could find, and we keep growing every year,” Miller said.

The region where the summit is held includes the second-largest community of Amish in the world. Most live in and around Holmes County, which has the highest concentration of Amish of any U.S. county. Half of the county’s population is Amish, and many members of closely related denominations such as the Mennonites reside here, too.

Amish Country is one of Ohio’s most visited tourist areas. Visitors flock there to experience farm attractions and museums and buy a wide assortment of handmade goods and artisan products.

Bed-and-breakfasts and inns line a landscape of sprawling, meticulously maintained farms. On many of the roads, horse-drawn buggies are just as common as automobiles.

What makes this area “perfect” for an event that encourages gardening and homesteading is its heritage, Miller believes.

“We live in a community where homesteading is a way of life. The notion of sustainable living is a deeply entrenched tradition dating back several hundreds of years,” he said.

“Our purpose here is to help people become more self-sufficient where they are and with what they have,” Miller added. “Any step you take to living a healthier lifestyle and knowing where your food comes from will give you more peace of mind.”

Max Kane has a 211-acre farm in southwest Wisconsin and operates a raw milk buying club. In 2009, he said the USDA, FDA, and state authorities tried to jail him over his raw milk deliveries to Chicago.

The experience reinforced his belief that Americans need the option to opt out of the industrial system and form private food networks built on trust between farmers and consumers, a view espoused by Salatin, who has spoken of the need for a “Food Emancipation Proclamation” that would allow farmers and consumers to conduct food transactions without government restrictions.

Kane created FarmMatch, an online marketplace he describes as “Etsy for local food.” The platform connects consumers with vetted farms and buying clubs.

Initially, FarmMatch arose to manage Kane’s own raw milk club more efficiently before it evolved into a broader project for the local food movement.

The food people eat is “the single biggest determinant of their ability to perform their life, whether that means litigating a case, playing professional sports, driving a bus, or carrying a child to the park,” Kane explained.

“If citizens cannot legally build private food systems that nourish their bodies and minds, they risk becoming permanently dependent on an infrastructure that leaves them sick, disempowered, and economically challenged. Providing awareness at events like this one [the Seed to Spoon Summit] is a valuable way to keep expanding the number of people who take the first steps to knowing where their food comes from and how it is raised,” he added.

RuthAnn Zimmerman and her husband Elvin live on a 21-acre homestead in northeast Iowa. An author of multiple self-sufficiency books, including The Heart of the Homestead, Zimmerman urges people to ask: “Where did this grow, who grew it, and how was it grown?” when buying food items.

She believes the interest in events and books related to homesteading, and on-farm learning experiences, can be attributed to mistrust of government and institutional stability.

Zimmerman thinks that many Americans still look at the government as their “Plan B” for food, and she advocates for people to grow and locally source food like “there is no Plan B.”

“That shifts the accountability back to individuals and communities to create real nourishment for themselves instead of relying on something that is not guaranteed to be there,” she said.

The homestead tsunami isn’t free of turbulence. New homesteaders face steep learning curves, health problems with animals, crop failures, predators, infrastructure costs, and physical demands. Property prices in many rural areas have escalated, making it more costly to buy land.

Social media can romanticize the homestead lifestyle and lead to disillusionment when reality hits. Animal husbandry, especially processing, carries risks if done without proper knowledge.

Success requires patience, community support, and realistic expectations.

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“A lot of people, especially recently, have asked me how Bobby is handling some of the attacks that come at him,” Hines said on the weekly podcast. “We see hit pieces in the press, and I’m here to tell you, he takes it in stride. Bobby has one of the strongest wills of anyone I know and hit piece attacks don’t bother him. In fact, it only makes him stronger and it makes him more determined.”

The weekend before, The New York Times ran a long article under the headline: “Kennedy Shows Minimal Engagement with Vast Health Portfolio,” reporting that the Secretary of HHS shows “little interest in managing the details of his department” and instead is “single-mindedly focused on his top priorities” – which the article listed as food, pesticides and vaccines. It was a hit piece, but one that probably had many of his supporters cheering, knowing that the man in charge of public health is focused on these three huge issues and not getting pulled into the weeds of managing a federal agency with an annual budget of more than $3 trillion.

Kennedy, Hines said, knows that when you have truth on your side, it’s very powerful.

“It’s a very big job, I don’t have to tell you that,” said Hines. “But the work that Bobby is doing, the work that Dr. Oz is doing, it’s important. It could be disheartening because there are so many attacks and there are so many people coming at them. But, the strength of MAHA is like a force field around them.”

During the podcast, Hines also shared news of big MAHA wins around ultra processed foods. “I was just in his office yesterday, and [Special Advisor to HHS Secretary Kennedy] Calley Means came in and said, for the first time in over a decade obesity is down in America,” she said. “The obesity rate is down. [Bobby] also said that Americans are buying less ultra-processed food. So we are seeing results. We are seeing engagement. We are seeing the messaging getting out to people regardless of what the press is saying or what the attacks might be. Real progress is being made and it’s because of you. So I wanna thank you for that.”

Over the last several months, Hines has become a MAHA advocate and spokesperson, speaking at three MAHA Action gatherings at the Ned, a private club in Washington, D.C., and appearing on numerous podcasts and TV shows, including The Joe Rogan Experience, “The View,” The Tucker Carlson Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Dedicated with Doug Brunt, The Katie Miller Podcast, The Adam Carolla Show, Club Random with Bill Maher, Juicy Scoop with Heather McDonald, The Dr. Drew Show, and others.

In March, on The Outkick podcast, Hines addressed the outlandishness of the attacks on her husband and what he’s trying to accomplish at HHS.

“It’s really ridiculous for anyone to fight against wanting to remove petroleum-based dyes in food, or wanting to remove arsenic in baby formula,” she said.

The work that Kennedy is doing, she added, shouldn’t be controversial.

“We’re talking about people’s health. Either you’re happy that the U.S. is now paying lower pharmaceutical drug prices or you’re just angry about politics and you’re just never going to say you’re happy about that.”

At the MAHA Action event at the Ned last month, Hines made a point about the MAHA movement transcending partisanship.

“I love that the MAHA moms, they don’t care if you are a Republican, if you’re a Democrat, if you’re an independent,” she said. “They care about the policies that are being made that are impacting their families’ health. They are unstoppable, and I think Washington, D.C. will verify that because they are feeling it and they’re putting a lot of heat on the right people at the right time and I am really very, very proud of them.”

Cheryl Hines of course is the internationally recognized actress and comedian who co-starred on the hit show “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” playing the wife of comedian Larry David for all 12 seasons that the show aired on CBS.

With co-star David making the introduction, Hines and Kennedy met at a Waterkeeper fundraiser in 2005. At the time, Kennedy was an environmental lawyer in New York who’d made a name for himself suing companies for discharging industrial waste into the Hudson River, killing fish and threatening the livelihoods of Hudson River fishermen, whom Kennedy was representing.

The two were married in 2014 at the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and were living in California when Kennedy announced, on April 19, 2023, that he would challenge President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination for president.

But halfway through, and seeing no path forward after the Democratic Party blocked him from the ballot in several states, Kennedy switched to running as an independent. And then, in late August of 2024, in a moment that the medical freedom movement will never forget, Kennedy joined Donald Trump onstage at a Glendale, Arizona rally, linking the health freedom movement, MAHA, to Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, MAGA.

After he was nominated by President Trump to head the Department and Health and Human Services and, in February 2025, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Kennedy and Hines took up residence in D.C.

“Being in Washington, D.C., you can feel the power of MAHA here,” Hines said on Wednesday, June 10 during the live MAHA Media Hub stream. “I will tell you, when the MAHA moms show up on Capitol Hill, no one is ignoring them. People are scared of them . . . . And a lot of people are cheering around the country.” …”

Hines was seated behind Kennedy during his confirmation hearings in late January of 2025 – hearings that brought thousands of MAHA moms to Capitol Hill, where they lobbied their senators to support Kennedy’s nomination.

“They are too knowledgeable and they are too loud to be ignored,” said Hines. “They get a lot of stuff done because they are true to their one mission – to keep their families healthy. So it is really something to see when you’re watching them go toe-to-toe on Capitol Hill against these politicians, and the politicians can’t argue that. They can try. But who is arguing against having a healthy family? It’s impossible.”

Hines has a 22-year-old daughter named Catherine from a prior marriage and is the author of a memoir entitled Unscripted, which was published by Skyhorse last November. In the book, she tells the story of the remarkable twists of fate that took her from Orlando and Tallahassee, Florida, where she grew up, to Los Angeles, where she struggled as an actress for many years, getting only bit parts, before finally landing the role of Larry David’s ever-patient wife on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” – a turn of events that she described in the book as life-changing.

During an appearance on ABC’s “The View” last October, Hines described what it was like meeting Kennedy. “He was living in New York,” she said. “I was living in L.A. I had just been in this entertainment sort of bubble. And then I meet him and he’s an environmental attorney and was just – he’s fascinating and he’s interesting and he’s smart and he’s funny, and completely different from anyone I’ve ever met in my life.”

One of the hosts of the show, Sunny Hostin, quoted from Hines’ book, in which she’d written that when Kennedy joined forces with Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign, her friends wrote to her, saying “You can’t let Bobby do this. He’s going to get Trump elected. You’ve got to stop him.”

Hines replied that she always shares concerns with her husband, but that she has not been a political person most of her life. She said that as a young adult, she was at first an independent and didn’t affiliate with any party, that she then changed her affiliation to Democrat, and has now changed back to independent.

It was Joy Behar who stepped in and brought up the issue of vaccines, pressing Hines on her views.

Hines replied that the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has paid out $5.4 billion for vaccine injuries since its inception.

“Yes, they are important and they are an important part of our health care,” she said about vaccines. “Can we do better? Can we make them safer? Can we listen to parents who say, ‘My child got the vaccine and changed, and stopped hitting markers and stopped developing the way they were developing’? Can we listen to people when they say that instead of saying, ‘you’re crazy’?”

Hines was widely praised for this careful and thoughtful response, and for asking that parents with vaccine-injured children be heard and respected, instead of being dismissed.

Secretary Kennedy and Cheryl Hines now live in a townhouse in Georgetown that they purchased last year. On the June 10 Media Hub, Hines said she’s been enjoying life in the nation’s capital.

“I have been cooking more, actually, since I’ve been in D.C.,” she said, “and I think Bobby appreciates it, though he really eats a very limited diet, we know this. He eats steak and ground beef and fermented vegetables. So I really don’t have to do much cooking for him.”

She said that Bobby is “as strong as ever” and will continue to fight.

“And one of the reasons why he can stay so strong is because of MAHA,” she said, “and because of the group that we have here. Everyone seems to move in such an organized, informed, enthusiastic way that it just is, a force, and we can feel it. He can feel it.”

Put more simply, Salatin wants to liberate small farms, like his own, from the large regulatory agencies.

In an interview with The MAHA Report in May, Salatin said family farms in America are slowly disappearing, citing a 2022 USDA census report that found the United States had lost 142,000 farms over the prior five years.

The economics are difficult for farmers.

“Out of every dollar that’s spent at the grocery store, the farmer gets 9 cents of it on average,” Salatin said, adding, “For beef, it’s higher. For wheat, it’s lower, but on average it’s 9 cents. So that means 91 of those cents are spent dealing with middlemen, transportation, processing, packaging, marketing, and distribution.”

What’s more, the average farmer in America is now nearly 60 years old, and younger generations are hesitant to take over because of excessive costs and regulations.

Farmers don’t need government subsidies to thrive, Salatin said. What they really need is “the freedom to innovate and sell directly to local consumers without facing a morass of red tape, regulations, and mandates.”

Salatin runs Polyface Farm in the hills of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and his work there is truly innovative.

The self-described “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer” speaks at homesteading conferences and agricultural events across the country, and he travels the world helping farmers transition from conventional to regenerative methods.

In every season, Salatin’s schedule is stocked with these engagements and appearances. He wrote a book released in 2024 called “Homestead Tsunami: Good for Country, Critters, and Kids.” It explains the growing trend of Americans moving to the country for homesteading and serves as a guide for people interested in becoming more self-sufficient.

Visiting Polyface Farms is a pilgrimage for many sustainable living and regenerative agriculture enthusiasts and Salatin offers a variety of tours, including“The Lunatic” tour, which features a two-and-a-half-hour wagon-guided adventure around the farm.

Salatin is a small farmer, but his reach is large and growing. Besides “Homestead Tsunami,” he’s written 16 more books, including “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front.”

People also flock to his blog, “The Lunatic Farmer,” listen to the Beyond Labels podcast he co-hosts with Dr. Sina McCullough, and take his online courses that include “Farm Like a Lunatic.”

But his biggest project may be the “Food Emancipation Proclamation” drive, which would “allow direct farmer-to-consumer” transactions without cumbersome regulations.

“If you want to come to my farm and get sausage, I should be able to sell it to you without a bureaucrat being involved,” he said.

He continued, “If someone wants to do that now, I first have to take the pigs to a federally inspected processing facility, which has to pass through a whole bunch of licensing hoops to keep their license, and I have to pay them to do that.”

Polyface Farm would be a turnkey operation if that was legal. Instead, regulations require otherwise.

“We have to take that pig up the interstate to a slaughterhouse, and we pay a lot of money to bring it back,” he said. “We lose all of our guts, you know, the stuff that we could compost and use for fertilizer, and the income we could get by doing it ourselves.”

Salatin’s decades-long critique of regulatory “red tape” resonates with farmers who report they are struggling to comply with rules written for much larger operations while trying to sell eggs, raw milk, or pastured meat to locals.

He chastises industrial food systems, government subsidies, and excessive rules that hinder small farmers — and he promotes decentralization, seasonality, and consumer connection to food sources.

“As farmers, many of us live every day wondering, ‘What infraction did I make today or who do I have to ask permission for today?’ We are suffocated in this morass of regulatory oversight,” Salatin said.

Salatin sees it this way: “The bottom line is you can’t have a successful small business with big government. Big government and small business don’t go together. Big government and big business, that goes together really well.”

He has what he calls a simple message to decrease chronic disease, reduce food prices, and rebuild local farm economies. It includes rebuilding the land from the soil up, shortening the distance between the farm and fork, and trusting local farms over distant institutions.

Polyface incorporates multi-species rotational grazing to mimic natural ecosystems. Cattle graze pastures, followed by chickens in mobile coops that scratch through manure for larvae, fertilizing the soil in the process. Pigs, turkeys, and other animals integrated into the cycle.

This “stacking” approach builds soil fertility, reduces parasites, and produces nutrient-dense meat without chemicals, grain feeding, or confinement.

The farm sells directly to consumers, restaurants, and through shipping.

Farmers, advocates, and policy thinkers across the world mention Salatin’s name as the architect of a blueprint for a different agricultural future.

They describe Joel as a thought leader of the regenerative agriculture industry and cite his emphasis on sourcing food locally, selling locally, and building resilient regional food systems instead of embracing distant commodity markets.

Others point to Polyface as evidence that small farms can thrive without relying on chemical-intensive monocultures or corporate processors.

Salatin has long met with resistance from neighboring farmers who don’t approve of his regenerative farming practices. One naysayer called him a “lunatic,” he said.

Instead of taking offense, Salatin took what was intended as an insult and used it as his moniker.

“I was getting so much heat from the conventional agriculture system. You know, we use compost, not chemicals. We don’t vaccinate. We don’t medicate. We move the animals around. They have an immune system,” Salatin said.

“I’ve been called a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, and a starvation advocate among other names. After one particularly aggressive phone call, I hung up and said to myself, ‘I can either be depressed and frustrated about this or have fun with it. So let’s embrace it.’ I just grabbed that mantra and it stuck,” he said, proudly proclaiming that “if you Google lunatic farmer, there is not another lunatic farmer on the planet.”

An opponent of what he believes is “extreme government overreach” in agriculture. Salatin hopes government regulations that “are detrimental to farmers, and subsequently detrimental to consumers” will be removed.

He laments that “four companies control 85 percent of what we eat in America” and believes that we need “freedom of choice with our food.” Thousands of farm entrepreneurs would launch clean food alternatives, but they can’t get to the marketplace because of these food regulations, he said.

Salatin learned regenerative farming methods from his father, who bought the property where Polyface Farms sits in 1961. Salatin’s grandfather was a “charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Farming magazine when it came out in 1945” and his father cultivated an interest in non-chemical agriculture.

The Salatins focused on land restoration, inspired by Biblical stewardship principles and the ideas of organic farming pioneer, J.I. Rodale.

Salatin’s father recognized that, as a small farmer, “he could never compete at the low-margin commodity level because he couldn’t produce enough commodities.”

“We had to become the middleman, the processor, the marketer, the distributor, in addition to the producer. The middleman makes all the money,” Salatin said.

As a teenager, Joel Salatin, now 69, sold rabbits, eggs, and poultry at local markets. In 1979, he earned an English degree from Bob Jones University.

Initially, Salatin was a reporter at the local newspaper in Staunton, Virginia.

“I figured I would be like Woodward and Bernstein and uncover a scandal, write my bestseller, and retire to the farm. That was the trajectory I had in mind,” he said.

Instead, he married a young woman named Teresa in 1980. The couple, who met during childhood, fixed up an attic in the old farmhouse on the Polyface Farms property and lived frugally.

“We drove a $50 car, a 1966 Dodge Coronet that I eventually sold for parts for $75,” he said.

“We lived so cheaply that we were able to save half our paychecks,” he recalls. “We never went on vacation. We didn’t go anywhere, we didn’t go to movies, we didn’t eat out. If we didn’t grow it, we didn’t eat it.”

The young couple lived on $300 a month selling beef directly to local customers.

“We didn’t have very many, but remember, we were living on 300 bucks a month, so we didn’t need much income,” he said.

Salatin left the newspaper on Sept. 24, 1982 and the couple decided to solely farm.

“I’ll be the first to say I thought I might have to go back to work [at the newspaper]. I didn’t know this full-time farming gig would work. But I had vision. I’m thankful that somehow, for some reason, God gave me vision,” he explained.

Salatin is keen on biodiversity. Polyface Farms shelters rabbits, chickens, and pigs “all in the same hoop house” during the winter instead of separating them like a conventional farm would.

Pathogens from rabbit droppings encounter chicken droppings, which are toxic to the rabbit pathogen. The chicken droppings then kill the rabbit pathogen before infecting another animal without chemical intervention.

Biodiversity creates necessary checks and balances on farms, Salatin said.

The pigs live in the pasture until they are brought inside for the winter. They are moved every five to ten days or so, Salatin explained.

“They run around in the fresh air and sunshine, eat grass, and have a wonderful life,” he said.

“Our meat cooks about 15 to 20 percent faster than regular store-bought meat because our animals never secrete adrenaline because they’re happy and not stressed,” Salatin continued. “Animals that are confined get stressed and spend their whole life secreting adrenaline. You can eat happiness or eat stress. I think eating happiness tastes better and is healthier.”

Please note: On June 17 and June 18, Salatin will speak and host workshops at the Seed to Spoon Summit in Ohio’s Amish country. Formerly called the Food Independence Summit, it’s one of the nation’s largest homesteading events.

Dr. Joel “Gator” Warsh shows signs of being a maverick.

The Los Angeles-based pediatrician isn’t in lock step with the mainstream medical community’s approach of giving a vaccine to everyone just because it’s recommended by the CDC. A strong proponent of informed consent, he believes in educating parents on the pros and cons of vaccines and letting them decide if they want to proceed, instead of pressuring parents to vaccinate their kids, an approach that aligns with the MAHA mission.

Warsh, who says he’s not “pro-vax” or “anti-vax,” considers himself to be in the mainstream. But he hasn’t hesitated to voice concerns about the potential dangers of vaccines, as he did in his 2025 book, Between a Shot and a Hard Place: Tackling Difficult Vaccine Questions with Balance, Data, and Clarity.

“I just want to see what’s best for my children and other people’s kids, and I’m just asking questions based on what I see,” he told The MAHA Report. “If that makes me a maverick, then so be it. We’re injecting kids with 20-plus vaccines in the first few years, and more and more people have questions. Many parents, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, have the same story of ‘my kid was fully healthy. I went to get a vaccine and that day or over the next few days everything changed.’ To me, that’s what we should be listening to. I don’t think every single one of those parents can be wrong. I know coincidences happen. But that seems like a lot of coincidences, and I feel like there are more vaccine injuries than we recognize.”

Doctors are supposed to follow informed consent for all procedures, but vaccine cases feel “slightly different,” Warsh says.

“A large majority of pediatricians are very dogmatic when it comes to vaccines,” he says. “And many practices require you to follow the CDC schedule, or they won’t accept you in the practice, or they’ll kick you out if you refuse. To me, that’s wrong. I feel like we shouldn’t be discriminating based on vaccine choices. We should be treating all kids. Most practices kick you out if you choose to politely decline, or even if you want to do an alternate schedule, which I think is unfortunate.”

Warsh, 42, has two decades of experience as a board-certified pediatrician. At the practice he founded in 2018—Integrative Pediatrics and Medicine—he specializes in vaccines, wellness, and integrative medicine. He’s published peer-reviewed research on childhood injuries, obesity, and physical activity and has been featured in many documentaries, films, podcasts, and media outlets.

Most patients in his practice vaccinate, with some doing a regular schedule and others a slow schedule. Some don’t vaccinate at all.

“Most of the information out there, anything you hear about vaccines, just tends to be so one-sided like, ‘vaccines are the best thing ever, and they can never cause a problem,’ or ‘vaccines are the worst thing ever, and you should never do it,’” he says. “I’m trying to bridge that and meet parents where they are. Most people are just scared and don’t know what to believe. I feel that doctors are a little bit more confident in vaccine research than maybe they should be. A lot more needs to be researched for doctors to be as confident as they tend to be about vaccines.”

Recently, Warsh was a guest speaker at a roundtable discussion focused on bringing to light the possible medical harms of vaccination and what can be done to tackle the massive epidemic of vaccine injuries. The MAHA Institute, a think tank aimed at fixing America’s health system, hosted the event in Washington, D.C.

At the roundtable, Warsh said one reason many mainstream pediatricians may not fully acknowledge vaccine injury is the lack of effort to adequately track and study it, making it hard to understand how common it may be or whether there are links to chronic disease. He also noted that many clinicians have not reviewed the primary literature on vaccine injury.

He referenced, for example, a 2020 study by the Henry Ford Health system in Detroit that followed more than 18,000 children born between 2000 and 2016. The researchers reported that vaccinated children were at least 2 ½ times more likely to develop chronic health conditions than unvaccinated kids. The study, which was not peer reviewed or published, is considered one of the most important of its kind.

Warsh believes the lack of a randomized controlled trial comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated children is the “gigantic elephant in the room.”

“Where are the studies using inert placebos as controls?” he wrote in his book. “Where are the studies that show giving multiple and a rising number of vaccines simultaneously is safe?”

Warsh would love to be on a team pursuing a long-term prospective trial on vaccine safety.

“That type of study would be the most important thing to be done in vaccine science,” he says. “I don’t know how easy it would be to get into a main journal. But if we could run a vaccinated versus unvaccinated study and people could come together to do it, especially around autism, it would be so important. I have pitched the idea before to do it, but people are very concerned it’s so expensive and that the idea will be dismissed.”

A native of Toronto, Warsh earned a master’s degree in epidemiology before completing medical school at Thomas Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. He trained in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles and practiced in Beverly Hills, then opened Integrative Pediatrics and Medicine.

Because of his concentration on integrative medicine—which combines conventional approaches such as drugs and surgery with complementary therapies like exercise and proper nutrition—he’s learned that parents who come to his office have a lot more questions about vaccines, often because they’ve read more about them. At first, he didn’t have all the answers but began diving into research about the potential dangers of vaccines with a burgeoning curiosity.

But the Covid era, when pharmaceutical companies declared their vaccines to be “safe and effective” without definitive studies, served in his mind as the “gasoline that lit the fire,” he says.

“That pushed me and a lot of others to start asking, ‘If they’re lying about this, what else might they be lying about when it comes to vaccines,’” he says. “For me, a lack of trust was certainly building before the pandemic. But that was the final straw that pushed me much deeper into the discussion and feeling like I want to be involved.”

Just like frustration built in him because of the Covid messaging, he takes issue with mainstream medicine where, in his view, everything is about supporting more vaccines instead of focusing on overall health.

“My job as a physician should not be pushing people to get more vaccines,” he says. “It should be to help people to get as healthy as possible. That should be 1,000 vaccines or zero vaccines, whatever the research shows. But it seems today everything is focused on more vaccines and vaccine efficacy, not about vaccine safety. Both things are important and both things can be true. The vaccine that can protect you can also cause harm. There’s no reason you can’t have honest conversations about that.”

Now one of the nation’s most widely known health freedom activists and the co-author of a book that encourages readers to exit conventional medicine and embrace natural living, Wilson remembers a particular night working on a case at her law firm.

“I was walking down the internal stairwell of the office with a deposition folder in my hand, and I looked at my partner and said, ‘Well, I’m leaving early tonight. I’m going to lead a shopping tour to teach people how to shop like the doc,’” Wilson said with a grin.

“Even then – when I spent so many hours working on corporate litigation – my greatest joy was felt when I was involved in helping people with their health.”

At the time, her husband, Dr. Nick Wilson, had opened a chiropractic and holistic wellness clinic.

Dr. Nick Wilson and Leah Wilson are now leaders in the natural health and health freedom movements.

Dr. Wilson is the founder of Alignment Training, Restructured Chiropractic and Vitality Metabolics. He also has a podcast and an Indianapolis-based radio show focused on natural health.

Leah Wilson is a health freedom attorney and co-founder of Stand for Health Freedom.

Through their respective advocacy, clinical work, foster care, writing, and speaking, the couple has crafted a movement that inspires families to improve their health by reclaiming vitality.

The principles of vitality, and the Wilsons’ story, are detailed in their new book, Reclaim Vitality: A Guide to Exit Conventional Medicine and Live Naturally, released by Skyhorse Publishing in January.

The book chronicles the corruption of what the Wilsons call the “sick care business” that is fueled by pharmaceuticals. The authors present a roadmap to natural healing featuring a “vitality score sheet” that allows readers to assess their assets and liabilities, optimize their environment, and rewire the thoughts that harm them.

In Reclaim Vitality, the Wilsons also offer a roadmap to activate the body’s God-given ability to heal. The five pillars of their plan are Rewire the Mind, Reset Sleep, Repattern Movement, Remove Toxic Inputs, and Restore Alignment.

The Wilsons encourage readers to live “vitalistically” with a lifestyle centered around conscious food choices, movement, breathwork, alignment, and rest.

Before you divorce yourself from the decades of lies you’ve been told about conventional medicine, you must take a first step toward reclaiming your health, Leah says.

Traditional medicine can lead to a dead end when you’re seeking healing.

“When people understand the truth, they won’t be able to be tricked into bad healthcare decisions anymore,” she says.

Leah Wilson told The MAHA Report that she and her husband framed the book in terms of virtues and principles “so that it will be more of a framework, and not a ‘how to avoid this food or how to find the best foods.’ It’s about shifting our reference point and exiting the model of whack-a-mole health care and fear-based decision making.”

Dr. Wilson describes modern conventional medicine as “whack-a-mole healthcare.”

You get a fever, and whack it with Tylenol. You get a cold, and whack it with an antihistamine. You take a vaccine for one condition, and it leads to a litany of other health issues.

“People just continue playing whack-a-mole, and the moles come faster and faster, and they never stop coming. And you end up increasingly frustrated,” Leah Wilson said.

“The game doesn’t stop by simply substituting your cholesterol-lowering medication with an herb that artificially lowers cholesterol, so to speak, if that exists,” she said. “It stops when we start looking at the underlying ability to heal and what’s interfering with your cholesterol naturally, as an example.”

Symptoms are the body’s whispers, and when they are ignored or suppressed, the body eventually screams.

Dr. Nick Wilson describes how a fever is a physiological process intended to eliminate invaders and give the body a “genetic upgrade.”

“Artificially suppressing the process could rob the body of immune-system reprogramming” it needs to thrive, Dr. Wilson said.

He recommends listening to the body and supporting its natural healing processes, which requires a mindset shift.

“Your body isn’t broken and in need of fixing, it is brilliant and just needs support to heal and thrive,” Leah explained. “When you understand this, you learn to trust your body’s natural healing process. You reach less for artificial treatments to suppress symptoms and more towards natural ways to aid these processes.”

The Wilsons’ foray into advocacy started after she and her husband became foster parents.

Years had passed since the birth of their first son when they were confronted with secondary infertility. The couple had long planned to become foster parents. The delay in having a second biological child moved the fostering timeline forward.

As an attorney, Leah Wilson hoped the day would arrive when she could address two patterns she saw in foster programs – aging out of the system, and overmedication.

When they entered the foster parent program, the Wilsons were paired with a sick 2-year-old boy who had been found in the cold on a 30-degree night.

The infant was unhealthy – inflamed, and completely swollen – Leah recalled. The boy also struggled to sleep and was afraid of men.

Most foster children with health issues are treated with pharmaceuticals, tended to by a local doctor who manages the trauma with medication.

The Wilsons’ home is a calming sanctuary, and the boy lived in an environment free of synthetic fragrances and harsh detergents, drank filtered water, and consumed only whole foods.

The couple gave the boy a non-toxic home that treated the whole child, and not only the symptoms.

The child gradually recovered. Over a year, his inflammation subsided, and he became calmer and happier.

Before this third birthday, the Wilsons returned a healthier boy to his mother, who was living in a Salvation Army shelter.

The foster agency was impressed. They recommended the Wilsons for more placements.

The couple prepared to welcome a new placement when Indiana issued a new mandate that all children in the home be up-to-date on vaccines.

Leah Wilson attempted to use a religious exemption, but she learned that this did not apply.

No family member can be a threat to the welfare of the foster child, Wilson was told, recognizing that, in the state’s view, being unvaccinated was considered a threat.

The agency delivered an ultimatum to the Wilsons: Walk away, or have their foster license permanently closed.

“It was unbelievable that they would rather have kids sleeping on the floor at the Department of Child Services than in our safe and loving home. It was unbelievable that they considered vaccination status a threat to a child’s welfare,” Wilson said.

The Wilsons were prevented from taking a new foster child.

The issue was “too big not to fight, but also too big to fight,” she said. They set out to overturn the vaccine mandate in Indiana. Ultimately, that happened. Foster homes in Indiana are no longer required to provide vaccination records, with the caveats of children being six months or older, and as long as children are not medically fragile.

“They don’t really actually understand that even medically fragile children and infants are safe in unvaccinated homes,” Wilson said. “But we did get that switch so that there are more available homes to children who need them, regardless of vaccine status.”

Propelled by their own experience, the Wilsons felt compelled to grow their activism.

“The health freedom movement lacked a voting bloc,” Leah Wilson said.

“Even though there were many national organizations and several state organizations that care about these issues and would host rallies or educate on the issues, we needed to have a meaningful voice to show that there are thousands of voters in every constituency that care deeply about health freedom, informed consent, parental rights and privacy, and everything that is related to health freedom,” she added.

That is what led to the creation of Stand for Health Freedom.

The Wilsons joined Sayer Ji and Dr. Joel Bohemier to establish Stand for Health Freedom amid the 2019 measles outbreak. The group expanded nationally, gained hundreds of wins across the country, and empowered hundreds of thousands of new families to reclaim autonomy over their health, Leah Wilson said.

“Many Americans don’t know if this school mandate issue or this employer mandate issue is a concern of their congressman or their state senator or their city council,” Wilson said.

“We wanted to provide that bridge and build a really meaningful voting bloc and voice for the health freedom movement to stop public health overreach,” she added.

Leah Wilson no longer works at the clinic, though she does teach occasional classes on natural health. Her focus is on Stand for Health Freedom and helping secure more wins across the country. She also embraces the opportunity to work with her husband to help more people find their vitality by escaping conventional medicine and living naturally.

“There’s definitely a one-way exodus from conventional medicine. That exodus will leave you in the wilderness if we don’t have the framework to reach the promised land,” Wilson said.

Reclaim Vitality is intended to help people ask better questions and to know that the majority of chronic illnesses today – like heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and autoimmunity, most cancers, even neurodegenerative disorders like dementia – aren’t random acts of bad genes, bad bugs or bad luck.

“They are predictable outcomes of how we think, eat, move, sleep and live,” Wilson said. “When we start to think, eat, move, sleep and live differently, we can get unstuck.”

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