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

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

The conventional view

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

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

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

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

A decline that starts before enlistment

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

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

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

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

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

What testosterone does under load

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

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

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

What measuring can and cannot do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Else Are They Hiding?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bringing Fauci to Testify

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For that, he faces contempt of Congress.

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

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

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

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

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

Who made it and where? And what was it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those decisions carried enormous consequences.

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

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

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

But constitutional rights do not eliminate legitimate public questions.

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

Transparency matters because trust matters.

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

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

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

The real question is different.

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

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

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

Reasonable people continue to disagree about those judgments.

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

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

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

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

Accountability is not about humiliating individuals.

It is about restoring public confidence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These facts are unimpeachable.

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

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

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

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

But now comes the “but”:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the kicker?

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

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

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

Not to this reader.

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

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

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

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

But the dam began to break.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever the motivation, things did not go as planned.

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

Dana got bashed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What does that mean?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He certainly does,” Kennedy replied.

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

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

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

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

Pause.

“Use our air”?

What would Jefferson say?

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

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

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

Bash called these words “categorically untrue.”

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

It was a remarkable moment.

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

It backfired.

The great Covid reckoning has begun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Whitaker is President and CEO of AdvaMed.

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By the time the hearing was over, millions of Americans understood why Senator Paul had such a single-minded focus in delivering Fauci to this moment. Many now would not shed a tear if Fauci did hear the clang of prison doors slamming shut behind him.

Anthony Fauci, the former Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the man who directed the federal government response to the Covid pandemic, was dragged over the coals by Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Ron Johnson (R-WI), James Lankford (R-OK), Rick Scott (R-FL), Josh Hawley (R-MI), Bernie Moreno (R-Oh), Joni Ernst (R-IA), and Ashley Moody (R-FL).

Fauci left the Dirksen Senate Hearing room in silence with his retinue of attorneys – minus David Shertler, who was removed by Committee Chair Paul for disrupting the hearing.

The people in attendance applauded Shertler’s removal.

Fauci rose to unprecedented popularity during the Covid pandemic, becoming ‘America’s Doctor.’ He once claimed to be the very embodiment of science. Starting in 2020, a fawning legacy media lavished Fauci with praise. While the Covid pandemic raged, Fauci’s star rose. His diary, which he kept on a government computer (and was therefore government property), was released to the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (author of the bestseller, The Real Anthony Fauci), along with thousands of other documents.

Fauci’s diary showed that he bathed in the glory of media attention while thousands of Americans were dying alone in isolated hospital rooms.

But the Covid virus, which fueled Fauci’s apotheosis, also carried the seeds of his demise. Revelations about the real origins of the virus dripped out. The public came to understand that the very virus which led to Fauci’s fame was triggered by the reckless gain-of-function research which he endorsed and secretly funded.

Fauci denied funding gain-of-function research under oath in previous Senate hearings.

And that was only one of Fauci’s lies.

That damned virus, which Fauci claimed jumped to humans from “nature,” was almost certainly ‘leaked’ from a Chinese biolab that Fauci funded through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.

Fauci funded the monstrous research that created the virus. In the end, Fauci and his government-funded scientists could not contain the microscopic monster they created.

Of course Fauci denied it all. He led a public relations campaign to attack and smear anyone who claimed that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“They’re conspiracy theorists.”

“They’re anti-science.”

The legacy media backed him to the hilt and actually became government partners in the suppression of speech about the origins of the pandemic. Legacy media outlets and social media platforms became agents of censorship.

Fauci gave multi-million-dollar grants to researchers to write the proximal origins paper to create the natural origin hypothesis narrative, even though many of the researchers privately expressed fears that the virus was man-made. Fauci used his influence with the media and the intelligence community to promulgate the most disastrous lie of the century.

Fauci’s response to his senatorial pinata treatment was to invoke the Fifth Amendment – 111 times.

After a few exchanges, Fauci’s rigid delivery of the same one-liner made for deadly theater – Samuel Beckett without irony.

Senator Rand Paul: “This is when the debate about (gain-of-function) began, you wrote in support of this in the Washington Post and you said, even if a scientist is bitten, even a pandemic should occur, the knowledge is worth the risks. Do you still stand by that?”

Fauci: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Senator Rand Paul: “There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today.”

Senator Ron Johnson asked Fauci if he was aware that then CBER Director Peter Marks suppressed an algorithm that revealed massive Covid vaccine safety signals, “including sudden cardiac death, cerebral artery occlusion, basal ganglia stroke, agonal rhythm, Bell’s palsy, and pulmonary infarction.”

He continued, “Your diaries now show that you actually suffered pulmonary infarction…I was wondering whether it ever went through your mind that maybe that injection, all those boosters you took might have caused that.”

Senator Johnson then asked, “Were you ever made aware of the fact that Peter Marks was warned that the algorithm (he chose to use) was going to hide the safety signals and were you told that senior FDA officials were showing dozens of safety signals associated with the COVID injection?”

Fauci: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Senator Bernie Moreno confronted Fauci regarding the draconian Covid policies he championed. Moreno recalled an event in which a family was arrested for sitting in the stands at a high school football game. Moreno asked, “Who the #%@& do you think you are? It is a total disgrace what you did to this country.”

Fauci did not respond.

Senator Josh Hawley accused Fauci of illegally using his staff – taxpayer funded civil servants – to solicit prize money for himself. One award provided Fauci with over $900,000. “You were getting rich while hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying,” Hawley said. “You turned your staff into a full-time application machine.”

Hawley then attacked the premise of Fauci’s use of the Fifth Amendment, “Let’s just get one thing straight. You don’t have any rights under the Fifth Amendment, because you’ve been pardoned. As you very well know, the Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more, Brown versus Walker, 1896 – ‘when he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege.’ You know that. Your lawyers sitting behind you now shifting nervously in their chairs, they know it…This is about contempt. Contempt for this body and contempt for the American people.”

Fauci again sat in silence.

Senator Joni Ernst confronted Fauci on his decision to approve the use of “aborted baby body parts” in mice research conducted by virologist Ralph Baric. “They wrote that they had created ‘a sandwich’ of aborted body parts in the mice.” Ernst then asked, “Dr. Fauci, do you think that human aborted parts should be put into mice to do Corona Virus research?”

Once again, Fauci took the Fifth.

Senator Moody pressed Fauci on the pre-emptive pardon he received from President Biden. “Did you talk to President Biden and ask for this pardon?

Dr. Fauci: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Senator Moody: “Who did you talk to in the White House about this pardon?”

Dr. Fauci: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Senator Moody: “Did you specifically ask that it be dated back to the beginning of 2014?”

Dr. Fauci: “On the advice of Council, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Senator Moody: “Did you do that so that you would be given immunity going back to the beginning of 2014?”

Dr. Fauci: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

Senator Moody: “I’m just very interested in why it was this date. Did it have anything to do with the fact that 2014 was also the year that the NIAID, or NIH began funding EcoHealth Alliance, understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence grants?”

Once again, the embodiment of science took the Fifth.

Democratic Senators were present but did not ask Fauci questions. Rather, they defended him, many saying it was time to move forward and not dredge up issues from the Covid era.

Mary Holland, the CEO of Children’s Health Defense, was in the hearing room and felt disappointed in the Democrats. “Everyone in the room wanted justice. What was so shameful is that the Democrats defended Fauci.” Holland added, “Millions of people died and they don’t want to talk about it.”

And Fauci, sticking to his stale legal script, did not want to talk about it either.

In the end, Fauci leaves the public stage as a deflated, sad, silent villain. He could be incarcerated for a while for Contempt of Congress. However, Fauci is eighty-five years old and could never serve all the time he deserves.

Let God judge him.

As for the rest of us mortals – we are left with a greater challenge: the need to make sure that we prevent anonymous, embedded bureaucrats from ever again seizing the kind of power that Fauci amassed. To do that, we must insist on transparency and accountability. We must make sure that making America healthy again includes making our republic healthy again.

No white-coated expert should ever again be allowed to tell people to isolate, shun their dying relatives, not practice their religion, and submit to a poisonous potion.

The type of monster that Fauci became and the type of monster he unleashed is still glaring at us from the darkness.

In silence.

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That itself was a huge victory long in the making.

During the pandemic, Sen. Paul, like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scrutinized Fauci’s decision making and his role in funding gain-of-function research, which resulted in the 2023 book, Deception: The Great Cover-up.

Many in the legacy media ignored the book. Now it’s clear it was prescient.

“Publicly, Anthony Fauci promoted the theory that the virus arose naturally while privately, he was well aware of a mountain of evidence suggesting the virus originated in the lab,” said Sen. Rand Paul toward the start of Wednesday’s hearing with Fauci, organized by the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.

“The American people deserve answers,” Paul continued. “The American people deserve to know why dangerous research was funded by NIAID in a totalitarian country. In a lab that lacked acceptable safety standards. The decision to fund dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, will likely go down in history as perhaps one of the worst public health decisions. Frankly, the American people deserve an apology.”

But Fauci had no answers. He stuck to a well-rehearsed script crafted by his legal team: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution,” Fauci said 111 times, including every time Paul asked a question.

“It is secrecy that destroys trust,” said Paul .“It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy. Trust can’t be ordered, it has to be earned. No scientist is above scrutiny, no government official is beyond accountability, and no public servant has the right to treat the suffering of millions of Americans as a footnote to his preferred version of history.”

Senator Paul was on to Anthony Fauci from the start. Wielding unimaginable power as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, Fauci had misled the country about the origins of the Covid pandemic and shut down scientific dissent.

When he appeared before a Senate committee in July of 2021, and Sen. Paul challenged him on his refusal to acknowledge that the experiments he’d funded were in fact gain-of-function and thus a violation of federal policy, reminding him that it’s a crime to lie to Congress, Fauci snapped. “If anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you!”

It was a shocking breach of decorum – for a witness to verbally attack a U.S. Senator in a hearing – and showed Americans how arrogant this longtime bureaucrat who sat atop the nation’s public health bureaucracy had become.

Sen. Paul recently released a huge trove of documents to the public in a ‘Reading Room’ on his website. Among them are over 1,000 entries from Fauci’s diary – a daily record of Fauci’s media appearances and his participation in meetings of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and briefing members of Congress on Capitol Hill.

They reveal a man excited by the start of the pandemic in 2020, who relished the attention he was getting. “Amazing day!” he wrote in the entries for several days in January and February of 2020 as the new virus began to spread from Wuhan to Europe, and then the West Coast of the U.S., with people falling ill and dying often within days.

As demonstrated by the thoroughness of his book, Sen. Paul has been relentless in his drive to get to the truth of where SARS-CoV-2 came from and who funded its creation, and to force those involved, including Fauci, to come clean.

To Fauci it may seem like an obsession, but to many Americans, it’s the all-important search for the truth.

In the pursuit of the truth of the origins of the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, Sen. Paul subpoenaed Fauci to testify before his committee. It was uncertain whether Fauci would comply with the subpoena and appear on Capitol Hill, three and a half years after retiring from the federal government.

He did appear, with a bevy of lawyers. But after an opening statement in which he accused the chairman of unjustly pursuing him, he claimed a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and refused to answer any of the questions that were posed to him, by Rand and other committee members.

In his closing statement, Sen. Paul played a video featuring Fauci repeatedly saying in media appearances that the virus had come from the wet market in Wuhan, when privately, in his diary, Fauci wrote that he knew it hadn’t come from there. He also criticized Fauci’s dismissal of natural immunity, a phenomenon known to humanity for thousands of years, from the time of the Athenian Plague. And he told Fauci that he wished he would have sought effective treatments for Covid-like steroids, which resulted in a 37 percent reduction in death.

“I would have been willing to accept an apology today,” Sen. Paul told Fauci.

But there was no apology from Fauci. Just silence.

[Deception: The Great Cover-up, by Rand Paul, was published by Regnery, a division of Skyhorse, in 2023. It’s available through MAHA Action, here.]

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The diary of Anthony Fauci that was released to the public over the weekend shows a man thrilled to be in the epicenter of the action, with President Trump showering him with praise and White House staff swarming to take selfies with him.

The diary entries show his glee as the virus spreads from its apparent starting point in Wuhan, China, and begins infecting people around the globe.

Sen. Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, obtained Fauci’s diary and released it online on Saturday on a section of Paul’s official webpage called the Reading Room. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a man at the very center of the nation’s response to the Covid pandemic.

Fauci headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 38-years and was the highest-paid employee in the federal government at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, earning even more than the president of the United States.

It could be said that he had more power than a Cabinet member, given that he was burrowed into the federal government and controlled more than $7 billion in grants each year. At a 2021 hearing, Fauci said that attacks on him were attacks on science itself. It was a ridiculous statement. But through NIAID grants that funded the work of thousands of scientists, as well as almost all major universities in the country, Fauci did largely control which scientists got funded, and which did not.

That power created a vain monster.

“Amazing day today!” Fauci wrote on January 29, 2020. Lou Dobbs, then host of the top-rated show on the Fox Business network, had called that morning, telling him he told President Trump that Fauci was the “smartest person” around and he should speak to him.

Fauci further records going to Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who lavished him with attention “(big hug, kiss and telling everyone how great I am – a little embarrassing),” his diary entry reads.

Later on January 29, he went to the White House for a meeting led by Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff, and after about an hour President Trump came in “…and the first thing he said as he looked at me was: ‘Anthony, you are really a famous guy’…He then stayed for 20 minutes and asked most of his questions of me.” When Trump was leaving the meeting, Fauci writes, the President smiled at him and said: “Thanks, again, Anthony. We are counting on you.”

January 30, the day that he briefed the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was “another amazing and difficult day,” Fauci records in his diary, noting that Rep. Ana Eschoo, a Democrat from California, said in the meeting that she “…felt safe in my arms.”

He notes as an afterthought: “Cases 7700 with 170 deaths,” making a record of the death toll of the new virus, not yet considered a pandemic at that point.

January 31, 2020, was “Another truly amazing day,” Fauci wrote. He says that he was sequestered in the White House all day, that he briefed President Trump, and that they then went into the White House Briefing Room and did a press conference.

“[HHS Secretary Alex] Azar led the presentation, but many questions were answered by me,” he writes.

Fauci’s diary may be difficult reading for anyone who lost a family member to Covid or who was shut out of a hospital while their father, mother, husband or wife died in isolation. It may be hard decades from now for people studying the Covid-19 pandemic to understand why a man in Fauci’s position would have spent so much time journaling about the attention he was getting from the media and politicians and celebrities.

In 2020, Fauci seemed to be having the best year of his life. Nowhere in his diary does he reveal distress or the sense of the terrible tragedy unfolding as the virus escaped China and spread rapidly across Europe, and as cases were first identified in the United States. There is also no curiosity or concern about how best to treat people infected with the new virus, or reflection on where it could have come from.

The tone of the Fauci diary entries is upbeat, presenting a man near ecstatic that the events of early 2020 have catapulted him to a level of fame few people have experienced – the leader of the free world lavishing him with praise, movie stars sending him flowers, and governors begging for his advice.

As we read deeper into the Fauci diaries we see the man’s growing obsession with the attention he’s getting.

On March 1, 2020, then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called him at his home asking for advice on how to handle Covid and telling him how much his father, former Governor Mario Cuomo, and his mother, had respected Fauci and how proud they were that he was an Italian-American.

On March 9, Gov. Cuomo called him again to get his advice on whether to close schools in the Orthodox Jewish area in Westchester County, New York.

Fauci tells him ‘yes.’ Close the schools.

But it’s the things that are missing from Fauci’s diary that are most interesting, and it’s important to note what these are, because of what it means for the continued search for answers about the origin of the pandemic.

You won’t find the name “Ralph Baric” or even the last name, Baric, in the diaries. Except in the text of articles that Fauci was posting in full, in the pages of the diary. This despite the fact that Fauci was talking to Baric, the coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina in early 2020, when the virus first emerged.

Fauci is believed to have invited Baric to join the very important February 1 conference call with top scientists, organized by Fauci and his counterpart in Britain, Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust.

In his diary, Fauci includes a detailed list of the participants on that call and their affiliations. The only American listed, other than Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins, is Robert Garry, professor of virology at Tulane University School of Medicine.

Fauci left off the name of Ralph Baric. Why?

The call was organized after Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Robert Garry and Andrew Rambaut all began talking to each other about the new virus, with all four agreeing that it appeared as though it had come out of a lab.

After hearing this, Farrar and Fauci quickly organized the February 1 call with a larger group, including Marion Koopmans, the head of the Department of Viroscience at Erasmus Medical Center in The Netherlands, who did her PhD on coronaviruses and also serves as an advisor to the World Health Organization; her deputy, Ron Fouchier; and Christian Drosten of Germany.

The original group of four – Andersen, Holmes, Garry and Rambaut – weren’t told that Baric was also on the call. Baric was a silent participant and did not introduce himself.

The original four all argued for lab origin, while the three Europeans added by Farrar all said it had to be of natural origin.

Baric is a key figure in the investigations into the origin of Covid-19 as he was the author of a 2015 paper on gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses, to make them more easily transmissible and more pathogenic. One of his listed co-authors was Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And in 2021 Baric was discovered to have been the lead scientist on a 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to perform gain-of-function on a coronavirus by inserting a furin cleavage site in a certain place on the molecule. The proposal was called DEFUSE. It was submitted under DARPA’s PREEMPT program. And while the proposal did not win approval, there are suspicions that the work had already been performed, or was performed afterward, either by Baric or by others – thus creating what became known as SARS-CoV-2.

Two days after the big Feb.1 call, Baric called Kristian Andersen. According to Andersen, Baric “attacked” him and his argument that the virus had been engineered in a lab.

Did Fauci invite Baric to join the call for the purpose of gathering ammunition to use against Andersen, to bully him into dropping any idea that the virus may have come out of a lab?

What did Fauci really know or suspect about the origin of the virus? It’s not in the diary entries. But leaving Baric’s name off the list is a sign that he was hiding something, and an indication he suspected that the diary entries would one day be made public.

Congressional investigators have focused on the Feb. 1 call and on Fauci’s actions that followed it, guiding what became the “Proximal Origins” paper in Nature Medicine, the purpose of which was to kill any speculation that the virus could have been manipulated in a lab.

That paper, published as a ‘correspondence’ on March 17, 2020, was authored by Andersen, Holmes, Rambaut and Garry, along with Ian Lipkin of Columbia University.

“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in the summary.

However, Slack messages from June of 2020 recently released by Sen. Paul showed that Andersen and Holmes did not actually believe the anti-lab origin narrative. They still believed the virus could have come from a lab – with Andersen saying he thought there was a 30 percent chance of a lab origin, and Holmes saying he thought there was first a 20 percent and then a 10 percent chance. Also missing from Fauci’s diaries is any talk of the possibility that the virus was a bioweapon, except in one instance where he notes on August 28, 2021 that the intelligence community’s report on the origins of the virus was released.

“The intelligence community report on the origins came out and in some respects it was good news in that they felt fairly confident that it was not a bioweapon nor that it was bioengineered,” he wrote. He then knocked the FBI, the one intelligence agency that believed the virus was the result of a lab leak, commenting that this was “based on no data at all.”

Fauci also bristles at Stanford University microbiologist David Relman, saying in an article in Nature that he would like to see all the records of the NIH “in their dealing with Chinese scientists. Truly amazing! There is no doubt that he has an agenda here and that is unfortunate.”

But what was Fauci’s agenda early on when some of the top evolutionary biologists in the world were developing strong suspicions that the virus was manmade? It was to head them off, to end the debate, to prevent any media from exploring the possibility that the virus was a bioweapon, and that it was either leaked, or was intentionally deployed.

Anthony Fauci’s diary only confirms what many of us already knew: That the man who was the face of the nation’s coronavirus response was arrogant and self-absorbed. It doesn’t answer what Fauci really knew or suspected about the true origins of the virus. But the absence of Baric’s name from the Feb. 1 call list, and Fauci’s determination to silence debate about the origins of the virus, should lead to increased scrutiny. We have to get to the truth.

[Wednesday’s hearing with Dr. Fauci will be streamed live at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on numerous networks]

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Eckenfels noted that there are voluntary radiation exposures – our phones, computer screens, and other electronic devices that we choose to use. These exposures are significant, but we have control over them. We can put our phones down and walk away from other devices that emit radiation.

What is increasingly alarming, Eckenfels explained, is the radiation we are involuntarily exposed to, such as that being emitted from cell towers.

As our technology migrates from 4G to 5G to 6G, our devices use higher and higher frequency bands. Those frequencies do not travel as far as lower frequencies. That means that the technology industry is placing infrastructure for this technology – cell towers – closer and closer to people, the end users. In front of homes, schools, playgrounds, football fields – even churches, she said.

“We now find cell towers in a lot of places where our children spend the majority of their days,” Eckenfels added.

Eckenfels leads the Electromagnetic Radiation & Wireless program at CHD. She said there are thousands of studies demonstrating the harmful effects of radiation from cell towers on human health, particularly children. She reported that symptoms include headaches, tinnitus, sleeplessness, nausea, difficulties focusing, even type 2 diabetes in children.

A review of the science on cell tower radiation in Environmental Health Sciences found, as of May 2025: 89% of 407 oxidative stress studies since 1997 show harm.

• 72% of 511 genetic studies since 1990 found effects.

• 78% of 480 neurological studies since 2007 found harm.

• 85% of 380 reproductive/developmental studies since 1990 showed impact.

Even with all of this evidence, government agencies are doing virtually nothing to protect people because the “the industry enjoys such a broad liability shield that was confirmed by, conferred by the Telecommunications Act of 1996,” said Eckenfels.

The issue needs more public attention and government scrutiny. Everyone values the ability to communicate and access data, but no community should have a dangerous technology dropped on them without an understanding of the risks and without recourse for the people who are injured.

Once again, an issue that our readers are well acquainted with rears its ugly head – corporate capture.

An industry lobbies Congress for special laws to enhance, protect or facilitate corporate interests. The laws quietly free industry from responsibility for the damage that their products, service or technology may cause to people.

Years later, people experience the negative impacts.

Federal regulators need to hold corporate actors accountable and protect the public – not Big Tech.

“For most people, this is an abstract issue and remains an abstract issue,” Eckenfels said. “even though some studies suggest that up to 30 percent of the general population suffer symptoms from wireless exposure. But only about 5 to 6 percent connect the dots, connect their symptoms to radiation exposure, and about 2 percent are so severely affected that it actually amounts to disability.”

Eckenfels introduced 18-year-old Amelia Gilardi, a victim of cell tower radiation. She’s one of the clients that the EMR and CHD is representing in a legal action against the corporation that placed the tower in her Pittsfield, Massachusetts, neighborhood six years ago.

[You can view Eckenfels’ and Gilardi’s entire interview with Tony Lyons, President of MAHA Action and producer/ host of the weekly MAHA Media Hub, here (@24.36) and below.]

In an emotional reflection on what happened to her, Gilardi said she and her sister were “healthy kids” until the day, when Amelia was 12-years-old, the cell tower was activated in her neighborhood. She and her sister suddenly “felt dizzy, fuzzy, and headachy,” symptoms they had never experienced before.

Within weeks of the tower being active, 17 of Gilardi’s neighbors reported similar symptoms – headaches, dizziness, nausea, tinnitus, Atrial fibrillation, heart palpitations, insomnia, double vision, increased depression, anxiety, and cognitive impairment.

“I developed migraines so bad that I couldn’t concentrate in school,” said Gilardi. “Dizziness that had me walking into walls, and nausea that had me sleeping with a vomiting bucket next to my bed each night, if I could sleep at all.”

Gilardi added, “One [neighbor] developed dementia. Others have had heart attacks, three developed cancer, which two have since died from.”

Fortunately, there are strategies to reduce exposure. So says Robert Brown, MD, author of the new book, UnPlug: A Radiologist Explores the Damage Caused by Electropollution and How You Can Prevent It.

“Amelia’s symptoms are similar to those reported by others who suffer the negative health impacts from electromagnetic fields, what we now call EMR syndrome,” Brown tells The MAHA Report. “It is estimated that 5% of the population experience symptoms of EMR from wireless communication whether they make the association or not.”

Local health officials investigated citizen reports, reviewed published science, and determined that the cell tower radiation was the cause.

Pittsfield’s health board sued Verizon in an effort to discuss solutions. A decision rendered last week was not good – the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court dismissed the suit, ruling that the city of Pittsfield “had no authority to pre-empt federal legislation, specifically the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996.”

The legal fight continues and CHD recently called on the FCC to scrap a plan for a four-fold increase in power limits for wireless devices.

Gilardi’s health improved but only after she relocated. Her fight for justice against radiation exposures will continue with Eckenfels and the CHD legal team.

The fight is not just for Gilardi or other people impacted in her Pittsfield neighborhood. A recent survey in Newstarget revealed that 10.1% of Americans report health issues from wireless radiation.

In the United States, that is 38 million people.

It’s time for our government to take EMR syndrome seriously.

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The benefits of chiropractic care have long been established. The mission of the Chiropractic Hub is not limited to what is stated on its website. Case in point – the inspiring story of Drs. Lona Cook and Amanda Blonigen.

Dr. Lona Cook began her journey in chiropractic services in northwestern Wisconsin in 2010, where she founded Cook Chiropractic Center in Chippewa Falls. The facility blossomed, challenging Dr. Cook to expand her team and capacity to serve the community’s demand for chiropractic services.

After attending a conference that challenged her to reach more of her community, Lona was inspired to extend health-enhancing chiropractic care to more families by making it more convenient to access.

In 2016, Cook Chiropractic developed a relationship with the Chippewa Falls Area School District. This began with on-site staff care but quickly evolved into providing optional, parent-approved chiropractic care for students while at school. The program grew quickly and proved the concept that many people were interested in the care and benefits if access was made easier. Dr. Amanda Blonigen joined Dr. Cook and the mission expanded.

Anecdotally, staff reported not only feeling better and more relaxed in the classroom, but they also saw the same improvements in many of their students. Some children were less disruptive and more attentive. Given these positive changes, the program expanded. For several years, the team added locations and chiropractors. As the team grew and more children had access to chiropractic care, Dr. Amanda and Dr. Cook saw an opportunity to share their findings about the benefits of chiropractic to school-aged kids. They reached out to two prominent chiropractic research teams – Life University and Haavik Research – and began a collaboration to design a program that would measure outcomes beyond anecdotal reports from parents, teachers, and children.

Later, they helped form Well Adjusted Students, Inc., a nonprofit, to expand access and research. In 2025, the teams collaborated to publish their first retrospective study, and also do a small EEG trial looking at how chiropractic care influences the central nervous system. While more research is needed in this field, initial results are hopeful.

Studying Chiropractic Care in Schools

The resulting study, published in June 2025, surveyed what Dr. Cook and her team had observed. Titled “Retrospective review of case records of school-aged children receiving chiropractic care” and published in the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, the study analyzed 180 records of children ages 5-18 spanning a 12-week period of care; it included questionnaires for participants as well as neurophysiological exams. Results indicated that many children experienced significant improvements in physical health and well-being, especially those with hyperactivity. In other words, the results are extremely promising, leading the authors to call for further study of the potential benefits of chiropractic care in pediatric hospitals and on-site school environments.

The study did not find statistically significant improvements in spine thermography, heart rate variability, or school functioning scores in this initial data. However, other metrics indicated that the chiropractic services that the school-based chiropractic team provided school children resulted in meaningful health improvements.

Researchers found statistically significant improvements in children’s self-reported quality of life, with total PedsQL™ scores rising and the largest gains showing up in the “health and activities” subdomain. Children also showed a small but statistically important reduction in hyperactivity symptoms.

The study’s authors note these are small-to-modest effect sizes and, because this was a retrospective case series without a control group or randomization, the findings can’t establish that chiropractic care caused the improvements — the authors call for a future randomized controlled trial to test that question directly.

Currently, the research team is also looking at data on how children receiving chiropractic may also positively affect the student’s attendance and minimize Office Discipline Referrals (ODRs), which would be impactful in helping schools.

The school-based chiropractic study is not a brash effort to hype the profession: it is a sober, scientifically conservative assessment that the authors hope will inspire more comprehensive research on the benefits of chiropractic in schools.

“This retrospective review of case records from children attending an onsite school chiropractic clinic has demonstrated some changes in health-related quality of life following a period of 12 weeks of chiropractic care,” the study concludes. “Further research using a clinical trial design is needed to extrapolate the findings and to assess causation.”

Looking Ahead

Many new frontiers in preventive and non-traditional healthcare have emerged in tandem with the growing national awareness of the chronic disease scourge plaguing the nation’s children. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has led a bipartisan, grassroots charge to understand and counter this health crisis. Chiropractic care and other holistic therapies have a seat at the table to discern care options for healing and well-being – to work alongside separate initiatives to improve children’s diets, food choices, and the quality and amount of exercise they do.

Dr. Cook, Dr. Blonigen and many committed chiropractors like them are making a difference in the lives of Americans and their children.

The vision of the Cook Chiropractic Center is to meet children and families where they are, promote nervous system health, reduce stress, and improve their day-to-day quality of life. The short-term goal is “to demonstrate the benefits of having chiropractic care on-site for employers, employees, teachers, and students.”

Dr. Cook is excited about the work her team has accomplished: “We’re encouraged by the growing recognition — among parents, educators, policymakers, and others in our communities — that our children need more options that build real resiliency and adaptability,” she said. “MAHA, and the voices it’s bringing forward, are helping these ideas gain traction. A healthier neuro-spinal system, at any age, gives a person a stronger base to grow from and engage more fully in life. Our goal is simple: get more natural chiropractic care in front of more families, schools, and individuals, so it becomes not an alternative, but a main tenet of healthy living.”

The MAHA movement’s goals align with the school-based system that the non-profit, Well Adjusted Students, Inc., supports. Like them, we want students to lead happier, healthier lives and have improved learning opportunities through the demonstrated benefits of chiropractic services.

This is hardly a radical vision. America’s children desperately need all the help they can get. More research is required to better assess and measure outcomes of chiropractic care in the pediatric context.

Meanwhile, Well Adjusted Students, Inc. has expanded to sixteen schools, including multiple districts. It is also assisting other regions while attracting international interest as well. As the MAHA movement continues to spread, its embrace of chiropractic care and other preventative, integrative approaches offers rich hope to our nation’s most precious assets – our children.

Additional Resources:

Well Adjusted Students, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that expands school-based chiropractic care and funds the research needed to measure its effects. Chiropractors interested in serving students in schools, and districts curious about the model, can learn more at welladjustedstudents.org.

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Those chemicals are often applied by lawn-care companies with reassuring names like “Lawn Health,” “Lawn Matters,” or “Healthy Turf.” But such names aside, a deeper look at these companies reveals that the products being sprayed are herbicide formulations designed to kill weeds in the grass, often using a dangerous cocktail of 2,4-D, dicamba, MCPA, mecoprop/MCPP, quinclorac, sulfentrazone, or related compounds.

Triad Select is a commonly used lawn herbicide containing a combination of active ingredients, including 2,4-D, MCPA, and dicamba. The Safety Data Sheet lists 2,4-D at roughly 30% to 32%, MCPA at 7.8% to 8.6%, dicamba at 2.6% to 2.9%, and more than 50% “other ingredients” withheld as a proprietary trade secret.

The label warns that the product is toxic to fish, may harm “non-target” plants, and that drift and runoff may be hazardous to fish and plant life in nearby bodies of water. “Non-target plants” can include the backyard vegetable garden, fruit trees, grapevines, pollinator beds, or native landscaping next door. The labeling also states that the product has “high potential” to reach surface water through runoff for “several months or more” after application.

This is what makes the little pesticide warning flags left behind by lawn companies feel so absurd. They appear to be mostly advertisements, with their company’s name in bold on one side, and, in small print on the other, warnings to keep children and pets off the grass for 24 hours.

A chemical half-life means that half of the original amount remains after one half-life. As a practical rule, it takes roughly five half-lives for about 97% to 98% of a compound to dissipate, and even then, residue is not necessarily zero. That makes the common monthly lawn-treatment model especially concerning.

When a product contains ingredients with half-lives measured in weeks or months, the next application may occur before the previous one has worn off. Persistence depends on the active ingredient, formulation, soil type, moisture, sunlight, microbial activity, and the chemical’s fate in the environment. For example, 2,4-D often has a reported soil half-life of 1 to 14 days, though it can persist longer in sediment, where it has been reported to last months rather than days. Dicamba’s soil half-life is commonly reported to be around 30 to 60 days.

The exposure issue is not limited to a single lawn on a single day. In a heavily treated development, applications are rarely coordinated. One company sprays on Monday, another on Tuesday, and a different neighbor on Wednesday, creating a near-daily chemical rotation all summer long. Opening windows becomes a gamble. Children walk and ride bikes along sidewalks and curbs that have also been sprayed because, apparently, not even a weed in the crack of a sidewalk can be tolerated.

Studies have found lawn-applied 2,4-D in indoor air, house dust, and household surfaces, meaning children are not even safe inside, as chemicals from the lawn can be tracked into the rooms where children crawl, play, and sleep.

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHNES) found detectable 2,4-D levels in nearly one-third of participants; children ages 6 to 11 had more than twice the odds of higher 2,4-D concentrations compared with adults ages 20 to 59, and women of childbearing age had 1.85 times higher odds than men of the same age.

The CDC and poison control centers track exposures under the broader category of pesticides, which includes herbicides. The true health effects are likely underestimated due to underreporting. Many people never call Poison Control, seek medical care, recognize pesticide-related symptoms, or receive an accurate diagnosis, especially because symptoms can resemble those of common illnesses such as respiratory infections or worsening asthma. Reporting also varies by state, and multi-chemical mixtures make causation harder to prove. Many products contain solvents, surfactants, and other so-called “inert” ingredients that may contribute to health effects but are often not disclosed by name, making exposure tracking even more difficult.

An SDS, or Safety Data Sheet, is the manufacturer’s formal hazard document for a chemical product, where the fine print often tells a very different story than the friendly lawn-care marketing. These documents commonly classify lawn herbicides as harmful if swallowed, harmful if inhaled, and serious eye irritants. They instruct users to avoid breathing mist, vapors, or spray.

These warnings matter because sprayed chemicals do not always stay where they are applied. Fine droplets can drift in the wind, and some chemicals, including dicamba and 2,4-D, can move off-site as vapors after application. This risk is higher during temperature inversions, when cool air is trapped near the ground beneath warmer air, allowing droplets and vapors to linger and travel sideways rather than disperse upward.

For that reason, product labels often call for restricting spraying during certain wind conditions or inversions and require applicators to take measures to prevent drift. North Dakota State Extension notes that during an inversion, small pesticide droplets can move thousands of feet, and volatile pesticides can move miles. Yet in many neighborhoods, lawn crews still appear to spray with little visible regard for wind, weather, or who is downwind.

Short-term exposure to lawn herbicide spray can irritate the eyes, skin, nose, throat, and airways. Symptoms may include coughing, airway burning, dizziness, nausea, or headache. The longer-term concerns are harder to study, but they should not be dismissed. Research on pesticide exposure has linked long-term exposure with asthma, wheezing, and respiratory symptoms, especially in children. For 2,4-D specifically, toxicology reviews have reported effects on the nervous system, reproduction and development, and organs such as the thyroid, kidneys, adrenals, ovaries, and testes. High exposures have also been associated with liver and kidney injury and neurologic problems.

Cancer data are more debated, but the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies 2,4-D as “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” and some studies of dicamba and other herbicides have raised questions about lymphoid cancers and other malignancies.

Families should know that reporting matters. If symptoms occur after a lawn application or suspected drift event, call Poison Control at 1-800-222-1222 for medical guidance and to help ensure the exposure is captured in national poison-data systems. Concerns about drift, misapplication, spraying without consent, or violations of label directions should also be reported to the state pesticide regulatory agency, often housed within the state Department of Agriculture, and to the local or state health department when illness is involved. If no one reports these exposures, they remain invisible.

And this is not just a home-lawn issue. These products are also sprayed where children, patients, athletes, and families gather: on school grounds, in public parks, on soccer fields, on playgrounds, and even around hospitals and medical clinics. It is almost surreal to see warning flags posted around institutions that are supposed to be concerned with health and the well-being of children and communities.

In my community, I discovered my children were playing soccer on a field the same day a treatment was applied, and the parks and recreation department said they had no warning when the companies they contract for the season decide to spray. Patients may walk past pesticide markers on their way into an oncology appointment. Families may sit in a park, allowing their infant to crawl in the grass, without realizing the grass was recently sprayed. We have normalized chemical applications in the very places where safety should be highest.

Some communities are taking action and have already decided that routine pesticide use does not belong where children play. New York’s Child Safe Playing Fields Act prohibits the use of pesticides on school and day-care playgrounds, turf, athletic fields, and playing fields. Connecticut bans lawn-care pesticide applications on day-care and K–8 school grounds and has extended restrictions to municipal playgrounds. Cities such as Portland and South Portland, Maine, restrict the use of synthetic pesticides on lawns, parks, playing fields, and other outdoor spaces, while Irvine, California, has moved its city property toward organic land management. Montgomery County, Maryland, even defended a broader cosmetic lawn pesticide ordinance in court. These inspiring counter-measures show that pesticide-free public spaces are not unrealistic; in parts of the country, they are already a policy.

I was recently talking with a friend about lawns being sprayed, and her daughter overheard the conversation and asked a simple question: “How could I find a four-leaf clover if our yard was sprayed?”

Children should not experience the outdoors as a chemically managed environment. They are meant to lie in the grass, hunt for four-leaf clovers, chase fireflies, pick dandelions, watch bees move from flower to flower, and discover whatever their hearts lead them to discover. Lawns are not just something to look at from a window. They are living places. When we spray away every clover, violet, and dandelion in pursuit of a perfect green monoculture, we are not just removing “weeds” – we are getting further and further away from teaching an appreciation for the natural world.

In his foundational essay Nature, written in 1836, transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “Every object rightly seen unlocks a quality of the soul.” Those words resonate 190 years later.

Maybe part of making America healthy again is letting children be children again, barefoot outdoors, searching for four-leaf clovers in lawns alive enough to grow them.

Why are we spraying grass at all, and is it really worth it?

Even in an HOA, there is room for sanity. Keep the lawn mowed. Overseed bare patches. Build soil health. Spot-pull the truly invasive plants. Let clover feed the bees and fix nitrogen. Stop treating every dandelion like a public health emergency while ignoring the chemical exposure created in the name of curb appeal.

A truly healthy lawn should not require neighbors to close their windows, children to avoid the grass, or pets to wait for permission to walk outside. The yellow flag is not proof of responsible lawn care. It is a warning sign, one that should make us question how far our definition of a “healthy lawn” has drifted from actual health.

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The secretary is also proposing a new list of injuries from Covid vaccines.

The timetable for changes to the rule governing the list is November 2026, with the comment period extending until January 2027. CICP has been around since 2010, when it was started to deal with H1N1 vaccine injuries. It’s been flying under the radar.

Why? Because medical professionals rarely inform patients about it – and Big Pharma’s long arm, strengthened by the ubiquitous advertising it places in legacy media, cunningly forbids such media from covering vaccine injury stories.

That’s no small oversight. Since its inception, also in 2010, the Human Resources Service Administration (HRSA) has, to date, reported 14,755 claims filed with the CICP. Only 92 have been compensated, a rate under 1-percent. The program is not functional and does not serve the public.

Kennedy is right to demand change and he’s following protocol to do just that.

The new Rule, posted by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, under the Management and Budget Office, states, “The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) authorized the Secretary of HHS to establish the CICP to provide benefits to certain persons who sustain serious physical injury or death as a direct result of the administration or use of covered countermeasures identified by the Secretary in declarations issued under the PREP Act. In addition, the Secretary may provide death benefits to certain survivors of individuals who died as a direct result of covered injuries or their health complications.”

Put simply, anyone who was given or used a covered countermeasure (primarily the Covid vaccine) and can show that they sustained an injury listed on a Countermeasures Injury Table within the time interval set forth on that Table, is eligible for compensation.

The table will detail injuries that are based on compelling, reliable, valid, medical, and scientific evidence. Such injuries will be presumed to be caused by covered Covid-19 countermeasures.

The new rule is a reasonable plan. The Countermeasures Injury Table will work similarly to how the original Vaccine Injury Table worked when the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act established its compensation program in the late 1980s – the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).

Big Pharma lobbied for the creation of the NVICP, claiming that lawsuits over vaccine injuries were driving them out of the vaccine production business.

In 1986, Congress pushed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act onto President Reagan’s desk and he reluctantly signed it. The Act granted pharmaceutical companies freedom from civil liability and ultimately led to massive increases in the number of vaccines the CDC came to recommend children take.

Big Pharma enjoys the same kind of protection for Covid vaccine injuries as they did forty years ago, so one would think that they would endorse the new model being put forward by Secretary Kennedy.

Not a chance they will.

Big Pharma still wants freedom from liability and more vaccine mandates. And they also want to make sure that the public knows as little as possible about vaccine injuries.

Even though Big Pharma and their aligned medical establishment partners won’t pay a penny to the injured, too many compensated vaccine injured people are bad for business.

Richard Hughes IV, a lead attorney representing the pharma-funded American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) lawsuit that challenges Kennedy’s changes to the pediatric vaccine schedule, said as much when he claimed that too many compensated Covid vaccine victims could result in vaccine hesitancy.

Hughes, quoted in The Hill, expressed concern over HHS listing overly broad conditions on an expanded table of Covid vaccine injuries. “In plain terms, timing alone is not enough,” he said. “Suspicion is not enough. Political pressure is not enough. The statute requires strong medical and scientific evidence of direct causation.”

The truth is: pharmaceutical allies including former director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), Dr. Peter Marks, hid vaccine injury data from Secretary Kennedy.

If Kennedy succeeds in expanding the list of Covid vaccine injuries in his rule change bid, the American public will be the winners: We will finally learn the truth about the number and severity of Covid vaccine injuries.

“With the COVID-19 injections, we didn’t need sophisticated algorithms,” Senator Ron Johnson recently said. “The sheer volume of adverse event reports overwhelming VAERS was enough to trigger my oversight efforts. We faced impenetrable stonewalling until Secretary Kennedy’s commitment to radical transparency provided my Subcommittee with 11 million pages of documents.”

It is those 11 million pages of vaccine injury documents that attorney Hughes, the AAP, and Big Pharma don’t want you to see. That’s all the more reason why, alongside Johnson and Kennedy, we must continue fighting for the truth.

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I did not find many legacy media outlets criticizing last week’s Supreme Court decision in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, even though it overturned a jury verdict requiring Monsanto to pay damages to a Missouri man who developed cancer after using the weed killer, Roundup, which contains glyphosate.

The Supreme Court ruled that Germany’s behemoth, Bayer (which owns Monsanto), had no ‘duty to warn’ because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not agreed that glyphosate causes cancer and therefore that Bayer had no extra duty to warn the public of that risk.

There is ample scientific evidence proving that glyphosate causes cancer yet SCOTUS, which of course is not a regulatory agency but an institution purportedly without a political agenda, protected a big corporation and left the injured out in the cold.

People are not stupid.

Time and time again, people see who institutions tend to protect. MAHA Action President Tony Lyons led the July 1 ‘media hub’ by calling the Supreme Court’s Monsanto ruling a “devastating blow” to public health. And Lyons correctly went further, laying the blame for the decision on “corporate capture,” the (illegally) close fiscal ties between government regulators and private industries like Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food, and, in the case of Bayer’s Monsanto, Big Chem.

Even though it’s tough if not impossible to prove that large corporations bought the SCOTUS decision, it certainly feels that way. “The message to families is: once Washington stamps a label ‘approved,’ you get no say and no day in court,” Lyons said. “Monsanto could have warned people, and two justices said so plainly. This is the same company whose old ‘safety’ study was retracted last year after it came out they’d (Monsanto) helped ghostwrite it…That’s corporate capture, plain and simple — exactly what this [MAHA] movement exists to end.”

More visibly, ‘corporate capture’ has infected the federal government on multiple levels and has transformed government regulators into silent corporate partners.

In the public health arena, Big Pharma has quietly taken over medicine. This excellent article by a Substack writer who goes by the name, Midwestern Doctor – “How Medicine Became ‘Too Big to Fail’” – provides insight into the various mechanisms employed by the pharmaceutical industry to seize control of and dominate the government agencies and officials who are supposed to be responsible for regulating them.

How did - and can - Big Pharma do this?

‘Midwestern Doctor’ explains that industry user fees now fund roughly half the FDA’s budget. Virtually “every recent FDA commissioner has left for a pharmaceutical company… Scientists who push back are marginalized, surveilled, or driven out,” as we discovered in the case of Brown University’s cancer researcher, Wafik El-Deiry.

Forty years of ‘Fauci-ism,’ the Substacker writes, has created a National Institute of Health (NIH) “where compliance is enforced through control of research grants and through massive royalties from partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry.”

No need to smuggle brown bags full of cash into NIH headquarters. Just reinforce the protection scheme through royalty payments that are out of the public eye.

This all leads to a place where regular folk get screwed and corporate interests are protected.

A system stacked against the people, that favors corporations over them, is a big part of what is turning America into fertile ground for socialism, which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “a system of society or of group living in which there is no private property and products are distributed, owned and controlled by the state.”

Every day, on media outlets that lean right, one can hear strong criticism of politicians who are democratic socialists. Figures such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mandami, New York Congressional Member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and, of course, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Given how corporate capture continues to work, one can understand the appeal, especially to young people who haven’t yet owned their own business or bought a house.

On July 3, President Trump told Americans that communism’s sudden re-emergence is the greatest threat facing the nation.

I agree with the president, given communism is socialism’s cousin; both systems reject capitalism in favor of greater wealth equality and public control over resources.

If we want Americans to believe in the capitalist system that once lifted up the middle class, we had better stop protecting the crony capitalists who are sucking the life out of it. If we want to extoll the virtues of capitalism, we need capitalists to behave better. And we need the government to hold the bad guys accountable, not enable them.

Moreover, corporate capture enhances monopolies and diminishes individual rights, which is NOT free market capitalism. One way to restore capitalism with integrity? To use anti-trust laws and transparency.

Enter Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who ran his presidential campaign on beating down the ugly corporate capture of government. Now he’s leading the fight to do exactly that by demanding transparency and gold standard science from the sprawling agency and its sub-agencies he oversees.

But we need more.

It is time for Congress to end protections for industries that have been injuring Americans and then hiding behind liability shields. Congress can start by passing Senator Rand Paul’s (R - KY) proposed Transparency Bill on Royalties Paid to Government Officials and Congressman Paul Gosar’s (R - AZ) End the Vaccine Carveout Act.

End the protection rackets. Show regular Americans that they are more valuable than corporate profits and people will believe in capitalism again – and the socialist and communist surge will become a historical footnote.

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America’s senior citizens also deserve to see a chiropractor of their choosing. MAHA is moving swiftly to ensure that they can, while receiving better overall healthcare support.

The alignment between MAHA and the nation’s chiropractic leadership has been building all year. Each step set up the one that followed.

In March, MAHA Action President Tony Lyons presented at The Chiropractic Summit, prompting a four-hour meeting between MAHA and chiropractic leadership in Washington, D.C.

In May, the American Chiropractic Association (ACA) and International Chiropractic Association (ICA) issued a joint statement pledging collaboration to improve patient access to chiropractic care. And in June, the MAHA Chiropractic Hub launched to carry the profession’s long-standing priorities forward.

Several key initiatives are converging to ensure senior citizens get expanded chiropractic care in 2026.

The MAHA Chiropractic Hub, hosted by MAHA Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, was created to host the nation’s chiropractors and connect Americans to a broader array of preventive medical services.

The nation’s two leading chiropractic associations, the ICA and the ACA, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the MAHA Chiropractic Hub aligning policy priorities.

These organizations have at times disagreed, but share a commitment to modernize Medicare coverage for chiropractic services as soon as practical. As Brandon Hoffman, executive director of the MAHA Chiropractic Hub, put it: “For the first time in this fight, the entire profession is pulling in one direction. The agreement locks that alignment in, and now we turn it into committee action.”

Added Hoffman, “This happened because of the leadership of Leigh Merinoff and Deirdre Goldfarb and the enormous effort of the entire MAHA team, who turned a shared goal into a signed agreement and a working plan in a matter of months.”

The focus of the MOU is to unite chiropractors and to advocate for updated Medicare coverage via H.R. 539, and S. 06 in the U.S. Senate, the Chiropractic Medicare Coverage Modernization Act of 2025.

Dr. Joe Betz, ICA President, is optimistic: “The energy behind this effort is unlike anything I have seen in my career. Chiropractors, patients, and the health freedom movement are aligned on modernizing Medicare, and the ICA will keep pressing until seniors have the same freedom to choose their chiropractor that they have with any other doctor.”

Added ACA President, Dr. Kris Anderson: “The ACA built the foundation for this moment: the bipartisan coalition, the relationships, and the case for modernization. With the entire profession now adding its weight, we have never been better positioned to get this done for our patients."

The organizations are united behind passing the bill and will strengthen it through the formal amendment process with three improvements: defining the covered benefit by each state’s authorized scope of practice, with an express exclusion of drugs, surgery, and obstetrics (which are not routine parts of chiropractic practice and for which the profession is not seeking Medicare coverage); adding Medicare private contracting rights for doctors of chiropractic modeled on the existing physician framework; and including a timely implementation schedule.

These amendments make a good bill better and keep the legislation bipartisan. The immediate goal is for a committee markup this session so the bill can pass in the 119th Congress.

Congress added chiropractic care to Medicare coverage in 1972, but that was limited to the sole service of manipulation of the spine, commonly called an “adjustment.” Other necessary services, including initial assessment and evaluation, are still not covered some five decades later. More than one in three American seniors lives with chronic pain.

For decades, chiropractic services have demonstrably offered less intrusive, meaningful relief for patients. Senior citizens deserve the right to choose preventive chiropractic healthcare, subject to the scope of practice limitations in each state. The states regulate the scope of services chiropractors may legally provide; Medicare is the federal vehicle that provides financial support to patients for some of those services.

Supporting patients in their healthcare decision-making is a foundational goal of the MAHA movement. Millions of patients have found relief over the decades through chiropractic care that often obviates the need for prescription painkillers (risking addiction or overdose) or surgery (threatening medical complications and a long recovery). A 2020 study in the journal Pain Medicine found that patients with spinal pain who received chiropractic care had substantially lower odds of filling an opioid prescription. Prevention is generally less costly than reactive allopathic medicine: it is also often more effective.

America’s senior citizens deserve the option to utilize proven therapies already authorized by the states that address root-causes and do not rely on drugs or surgeries that often fail to relieve suffering. Especially with spinal injuries or strains, surgery should be the last medical recourse: only after milder, less intrusive treatments such as chiropractic care are employed should surgery be contemplated. Many patients will respond positively to lower-risk adjustments, saving the pain, risk, and cost of surgeries.

This is why improved chiropractic care aligns with the policy priorities of the MAHA movement. Prevention is superior to reactive cures. Less intrusive means should be employed before recourse to opioids and scalpels.

To support this initiative, MAHA invites MAHA Report readers to visit MAHA Action’s Legislative Tracker to determine whether their elected representatives support H.R. 539. If not, the website provides a precise message to send along with contact details for each congressperson. Please then follow up with a phone call to the representative’s office by July 15, repeating the petition to cosponsor and support H.R. 539.

As of July 7, 2026, 166 House members cosponsor the bill (96 Republicans and 70 Democrats), along with 15 cosponsors in the Senate.

The nation’s most prominent chiropractic organizations are in agreement that Medicare must be modernized to support improved patient outcomes, and they’re mobilizing behind H.R. 539 to do so. Chiropractors from across the nation will gather in Washington, D.C. from July 19-21 to raise awareness of H.R. 539 and garner legislative and voter support for this law change. What the bill needs now is a committee vote, this session.

America’s senior citizens have been waiting since 1972 for this simple remedy of an outdated system. With the help of the MAHA movement, 2026 can and should be the year Congress finally passes chiropractic Medicare modernization legislation and gives our seniors the care choices they deserve.

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In making the announcement, Secretary Kennedy said, “More than 60 years ago, my uncle, President John F. Kennedy, challenged America to make physical fitness a national priority because he understood that the strength of our nation begins with the health of our people.”

Today, by all metrics, American kids have gone soft. Will the Presidential Fitness Test, which President Trump signed into law last July, help toughen them up?

In 2024, a group that advocates for greater physical activity released a report card on physical activity for children that showed only about a quarter of 6- to 17-year-olds in the United States get the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity.

More than 20 percent of American kids are now considered obese, with obesity connoting a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or higher.

Critics point to how most American children spend their days – sitting in classrooms, with recess only for elementary school students. Those recess periods, critics argue, are too few and too short for the typical 7-hour school day. And only a handful of states mandate daily recess, even for kids in grades K-5.

What’s more, in most American elementary schools, children only have physical education (PE) classes once or twice a week, while in high schools there is no recess period, usually no outdoor time, and often no PE requirement.

These facts help explain why the majority of American kids not involved in after-school sports quickly lose muscle tone and aerobic ability – and, by the time they graduate high school, are out of shape.

In bringing back the Presidential Fitness Test, the Trump administration aims to reverse this disturbing trend.

As reconfigured, the Presidential Fitness Test has two levels – Presidential and National. The former has more rigorous standards and is likely to challenge the majority of American kids, even those who are athletes.

Presidential Level

A 10-year-old boy has to do either 45 curl-ups or hold a plank for 119 seconds.

• For Cardio, he has to either run a mile in 7 minutes, 57 seconds, or he has to run at least 55 laps (of a 20 meter stop/ start sprint) in 20 minutes.

• For Upper Body work, he has to either do 22 right-angle push-ups or six pull-ups.

• A 17-year-old boy has to run at least a 6 minute, 6 second mile or do 84 laps in 20 minutes.

• A 10-year-old girl has to run a mile in 9 minutes, 19 seconds or do 41 laps in 20 minutes.

• A 17-year-old girl has to run a mile in 7 minutes, 59 seconds or do 50 laps in 20 minutes.

You can check the chart on the White House website to see the passing Presidential Level scores for boys and girls at different ages.

The return of the Presidential Fitness Test follows an executive order that President Donald Trump signed last year, and is part of the MAHA movement’s push to improve Americans’ overall health.

The original Presidential Fitness Test was inspired by testing done in the early 1950s that showed American children were much less physically fit than their European counterparts. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness, and this council began developing tests for youth fitness.

In December of 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy wrote a remarkable article for Sports Illustrated that was published under the headline: “The Soft American.” He began with a reference to Ancient Greece, describing how 2,500 years ago, men “from all quarters of the Greek world” gathered in Olympia to compete in the famous athletic contests that we know today as the Olympic games and how, when they returned to their homes with their Olympic crowns, they were greeted as heroes and received rich rewards.

“Thus the same civilizations which produced some of our highest achievements of philosophy and drama, government and art, also gave us a belief in the importance of physical soundness which has become a part of the Western tradition,” Kennedy wrote.

But he went on to say the idea that the physical well-being of a nations’ citizens determines the strength of that nation was in danger in 1960 America.

Kennedy highlighted the poor performance of American children on physical fitness tests in the 1950s, and also the startling fact that almost one out of every two young American males was rejected for military service because they were mentally, morally or physically unfit.

The article was widely read and discussed, and focused the attention of all Americans on the need for rigorous physical fitness, especially in schools.

Once in office, President Kennedy changed the name of the organization Eisenhower had founded to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, and appeared in ads, produced by the Advertising Council, promoting 50-mile hikes. Details of JFK’s fitness program even became the substance of a best-selling book.

President Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson, established the Physical Fitness Award Program to recognize children and teenagers who exceeded the 85th percentile on the fitness tests.

But the Presidential Fitness Test fell out of favor in recent years amid complaints that naturally athletic kids won commendation while children who were less athletic were made to feel inferior. In 2013, it was discontinued.

The return of the Presidential Fitness Test, coupled with MAHA-inspired nutrition, are generational opportunities to change Americans’ health, one student at a time. The test has already been embraced by several states, including Tennessee and Arkansas. Let’s hope more states, and their schools, will follow suit.

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Welcome to the MAHA Media Hub, and welcome to the MAHA Revolution. I’m Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action.

I want to start with last Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling for Bayer/Monsanto, because it’s a devastating blow to public health. By shielding the maker of Roundup from liability for failing to warn people, the Court put profits ahead of American families. John Durnell used Roundup for about 20 years and developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A jury of ordinary Americans heard the evidence and held Monsanto accountable — and the Supreme Court just threw that verdict out. The message to families is: once Washington stamps a label “approved,” you get no say and no day in court. And here’s what’s hard to stomach: Monsanto could have warned people, and two justices said so plainly. This is the same company whose old “safety” study was retracted last year after it came out they’d helped ghostwrite it. And this isn’t left versus right: The dissent was written by Justice Jackson and joined by Justice Gorsuch, appointed by opposite parties. That’s corporate capture, plain and simple — exactly what this movement exists to end.

So hear me clearly: This isn’t the end of the fight, it’s the start of a bigger one. We’ll go to Congress and demand they restore every American’s right to hold these companies accountable — and the Senate, writing its Farm Bill right now, must not write this shield back in. We’ll push the EPA for an honest, independent review of glyphosate, built on real science, not studies paid for by the people selling the chemical. And we’ll take it to the ballot box, because this is why the midterms matter and why we need MAHA candidates elected. Monsanto has the money, the lawyers, and now a ruling from the Supreme Court. We have something stronger: millions of Americans tired of being told to sit down and accept a food system that’s making their kids sick. We will not be quiet. We will not back down. We will not stop. Thursday’s decision is a setback, not the final word — and together, we’re going to win.

Now, as hard as that ruling was, this same week also brought major victories for the MAHA movement — victories that show our message is breaking through and our priorities are moving forward.

President Trump signed an Executive Order directing HHS, USDA, and EPA to scale regenerative agriculture across America. That means strengthening farm resilience, rebuilding soil health, reducing input costs, improving profitability for farmers, expanding export markets, and supporting rural communities. That’s exactly the kind of long-term thinking we need if we’re serious about reducing our dependence on toxic chemicals while keeping American agriculture strong.

Secretary Kennedy and Dr. Oz announced tremendous progress on eliminating healthcare fraud, to the tune of 6.5 billion dollars. We also saw continued commitment to the STREETS initiative — expanding peer support, strengthening faith-based partnerships, and helping more Americans find lasting recovery from addiction.

We are bringing back the Presidential Fitness Test and reversing the failed Fauci-era policies that did so much damage to public health and public trust.

And just yesterday, Secretary Kennedy announced the end of the Covid-19 Emergency Use Authorization declarations. HHS made clear that the emergency authorities used during Covid are no longer justified. As Secretary Kennedy put it, Americans deserve a regulatory system that is transparent, accountable, and rooted in the rule of law — and emergency powers must be temporary and targeted. This is a major step toward restoring accountability, transparency, and trust in our health agencies.

And there’s more accountability ahead. After years of oversight efforts led by Senator Rand Paul, Dr. Anthony Fauci has finally been subpoenaed, and is expected to testify on July 29.

MAHA is making incredible progress, but we must not lose focus and get discouraged by setbacks, because the people and institutions pushing centralized control over health, food, agriculture, and public policy are still powerful. They are still organized. And they are still working to shape the future of this country in their perverse image, not one that serves the American people.

One of the clearest examples is Bill Gates.

Bill Gates represents a broader model of power: private wealth influencing public health, vaccine policy, food systems, farmland, synthetic meat, climate interventions, and global institutions, without any transparency or democratic accountability. During Covid, Gates became one of the most visible private figures promoting mass vaccination and restrictive policies. No unelected billionaire should have that much influence over public health decisions that affect millions of families.

Let’s be honest about what’s at stake. While this administration is rebuilding our food system by investing in regenerative agriculture and healthier farming practices, Bill Gates has consistently backed a very different vision—one centered on technological interventions, including genetically modified mosquitoes, solar geoengineering research, large-scale farmland acquisition, lab-grown meat, and synthetic food production. MAHA believes the future of health begins by restoring nature, not replacing it. These are not isolated issues. They are part of a larger fight over who controls our health, our food supply, our farms, our children’s future, and our freedom.

The MAHA movement stands for something very different. We stand for real food. We stand for regenerative agriculture. We stand for family farms. We stand for medical freedom. We stand for transparency, informed consent, and accountability. We stand for parents, children, farmers, workers, and communities. And we are proving that when people get organized, when they speak the truth, and when they refuse to back down, they can win.

So, yes, this was a great week for MAHA. But we cannot get complacent. We must stay vigilant. We must stay focused. And we must keep fighting.

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Since its inception, the MAHA movement has focused on the chronic disease epidemic caused by highly processed foods deficient in essential nutrients. Updating the nation’s food pyramid and fighting against using food additives were long overdue improvements to Americans’ nutrition, but procuring healthier food for the nation’s grocery stores, school cafeterias and hospitals also requires dramatic shifts in agricultural production methods.

On June 25, President Trump issued a broad executive order, Advancing Regenerative Agriculture and Strengthening American Farm Resilience, to support that transition.

Tensions between organic farming methods and conventional, often chemical-dependent farming practices create friction between farming communities and consumer groups. Some activists demand clean, organic foods immediately, while others want affordable food and are not concerned about possible chemical residues. The president’s effort to reduce chemical contamination by supporting regenerative practices hit a nerve among the former group, who want the president to do more to eliminate chemical use.

One concern is with the use of the term “regenerative.” Large producers and corporations often co-opt labels such as “organic,” “GMO-free,” and “sustainable” by applying them to products or practices that are not beneficial. This weakens consumer trust, undercutting profitability for organic producers and rewarding bad actors.

However, many regenerative farming advocates applauded Trump’s executive order. Kelly Ryerson, of American Regeneration, stated, “The administration’s new mandate to prioritize resources and attention to regenerative agriculture is a refreshing and much-needed commitment to provide our struggling farmers with a viable offramp from the chemical treadmill that keeps them mired in debt.”

Ryerson continued, “HHS spotlighting the connection between soil health, farming practices, and human health is exactly the work that will expedite relief from our chronic disease epidemic.”

Most organic producers understand that, short of a purist agricultural system in which all farms are organic, large conventional farms must be incentivized to use fewer polluting methods where possible, which means implementing what can only be called “regenerative” practices. U.S. agriculture has been pressured to adopt industrial methodology and rapid consolidation for decades, resulting in a system that depletes soils, water resources, and nutrients.

Such methods include the production of a massive amount of genetically modified corn and soy every year, used in animal feed and fuel production. These crops are not transitioning to organic overnight, and rely on routine applications of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. The June 25 executive order does not aim to convert all U.S. farmland to organic production rapidly, but rather to reduce the amount of chemicals used in existing industrial systems. Following decades of federal subsidies and regulations that pressured farmers to invest in chemical applications, the Trump administration is implementing unprecedented steps to reverse that trend.

The EO also specifically calls for research into the potential adverse health impacts of cumulative chemical residue exposures, the development of less toxic alternative chemical products to replace current agricultural chemicals, and a long-overdue study of the impacts of glyphosate and other chemicals used as pre-harvest desiccants. This information can serve as the foundation for future reductions in chemical applications to Americans’ food and ethanol supplies.

Announcing interagency plans to boost regenerative farming, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explained: “The quality of our food begins with the way we grow it, and that’s why America’s farmers are essential partners to this mission. At HHS, … through the Advanced Research Projects for Health, we’re investing in new technologies that can reduce reliance on chemical crop protection tools while improving human health.”

Conventional farmers are learning that new technologies allow them to reduce (but not eliminate) expensive chemical applications while increasing yields using regenerative practices such as reduced tilling, cover cropping, rotational grazing, and intercropping. This is a dynamic shift in crop management that is less harmful to soils and uses fewer chemical inputs.

No, President Trump’s E.O does not convert the U.S. agricultural system to organic production, as many Americans wish the nation would do. Yet a major transition of that degree would send economic shocks throughout farming communities and into grocery store shelves. American farming shifted to chemical dependency over many decades; it will not revert to clean soils and zero chemicals overnight.

Some Americans abhor President Trump so greatly, or fantasize so forcefully that the U.S. farming system will transform overnight, that they fail to acknowledge that no president has ever done anything remotely like issue an executive order marshaling federal funds and agency resources to galvanize action to reduce chemical use and incentivize the nation’s crop farmers to use fewer chemicals in production. This is the most sensible and cost-effective way to begin reversing the folly of routinely dousing American farmland with chemicals whose effects are insufficiently studied and understood.

Improving soil health and reducing chemical exposures fits the MAHA policy agenda. U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins praised America’s farmers, saying, “All the work on dietary guidelines, and better health in foods, and better health in America’s diets, all of the make America healthy again effort is about putting our farmers and ranchers and real food back at the center of what we’re doing here in Washington.”

Yes, the nation has a long way to go to learn how to better steward its soils. But new technologies permit aerial observation to reduce chemical applications and study soil health. Other advances can break down existing chemical pollution, develop less harmful alternatives, and educate farmers in how to apply these emerging technologies. The federal government is paying American farmers to learn and to change practices. These policies simultaneously boost rural farming economies, protect vital water supplies, and reduce soil erosion and chemical pollution.

As an organic farmer (and diner), I want to see America’s farming systems transition to holistic, healthy soil and land stewardship. But to do so, Americans must not view their crop farmers as villains to be vanquished, but as allies and neighbors to be recruited.

In my 2023 book, Small Farm Republic, I advocate for diverting some of the massive crop insurance and other federal subsidies to support regenerative practices. President Trump’s latest executive order takes meaningful steps in that direction – providing much-needed economic relief to farmers while incentivizing agricultural practices that help move the nation toward a cleaner environment and food supply.

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

All proceeds go to supporting the cause.

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

All proceeds go to supporting the cause.

MAHA Merch Store

A core part of the antitrust division’s mission at DOJ, said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole Sarrine, is “to identify situations where illegal, anticompetitive conduct — such as conspiracies among companies to stop competing — has contributed to rising prices.”

According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, ground beef prices were $6.74 a pound in May, a 16% increase over last year and 40% more than five years ago, in 2021. In a forecast earlier this year, the USDA estimated that beef prices will rise by as much as 18% in 2026.

What’s causing that spike?

The Justice Department is using its new, America First approach to scrutinize foreign-owned beef companies operating in the United States. In May, the USDA and the DOJ said they are investigating foreign-owned beef companies for manipulative practices and potential antitrust violations, which they believe have contributed to driving up the price of ground beef for Americans.

Four meatpacking companies – Cargill, Tyson Foods, JBS USA and National Beef Packing – control 85% of the U.S. beef market. Two of these – JBS and National Beef Packing – are subsidiaries of companies that are based in Brazil.

At the press conference in May with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and senior trade adviser Peter Navarro, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins referred to JBS and National Beef Packing as “a threat not just to our cattle producers, but a threat to America itself.”

JBS is the largest beef producer in the U.S. and the nation’s second-largest producer of poultry and pork. Half of the company’s annual revenue comes from the U.S., where it employs more than 72,000 people.

The company’s U.S. headquarters are in Greeley, Colorado.

In 2022, JBS agreed to a $52.5 million settlement with grocery stores and wholesalers which alleged that JBS had worked with Tyson Foods and other companies to suppress the number of cattle slaughtered in order to increase beef prices.

At the May press conference, Rollins said that foreign ownership of meatpacking companies has been affiliated not just with corruption and cartels, but also slave labor.

Just days before, prosecutors in Brazil had filed a lawsuit against JBS, alleging that the company bought cattle from farms where workers were held in slavery-like conditions.

The civil action seeks around $24 million in American dollars – a number that prosecutors say reflects the value of transactions between JBS and suppliers.

According to the lawsuit, 53 workers were rescued between 2014 and 2025 from properties owned by seven ranchers that were the meatpacking company’s suppliers.

Prosecutors said that the ranchers were listed in Brazil’s public registry of companies that were found to have subjected workers to conditions that are similar to slavery.

Peter Navarro said foreign ownership of beef production, along with a historically tight cattle supply and the dominance of the meatpacking industry by the four large companies, has driven up the cost of beef for all Americans. These foreign companies are accused of collusion, price fixing, and price manipulation.

Consolidation across the meatpacking sector has narrowed marketing options for ranchers, Rollins explained.

“It weakens their negotiating power, and it risks reliance on a single buyer,” Rollins said. “Today, the concentration of larger plants opens the door to tighter coordination by the ‘Big Four’ with producers. As ranchers face fewer options for selling their animals, the ‘Big Four’ grow stronger and stronger.”

Disruptions in highly concentrated markets can have widespread impacts, Rollins added.

“When just four firms control a market, suppliers and food prices are rocked heavily when disruptions occur,” Rollins said. “The last few years have proven that the protein sector, especially, and therefore our food security, is especially at risk when global pandemics, animal disease outbreaks and facility issues like fires, labor disputes, foodborne illnesses and cybersecurity attacks occur.”

“More U.S.-owned packers in more American regions of the country provides more opportunities for our ranchers and stronger food security for our country,” she added.

Rollins linked the probe to a broader food-security concern, explaining that the U.S. has lost more than 17% of its cattle ranchers over the last decade, a total that includes more than 100,000 ranches.

“Growing the herd size is an immediate problem in need of solutions, and we’ve already begun implementing across the government and into the states how we’re going to solve for that,” Rollins said.

“Droughts, wildfire, overregulation from previous administrations and volatile markets,” have contributed to the current cattle herd size, Rollins pointed out.

Navarro was also critical of the political spending of the foreign beef companies in the U.S., saying JBS “hands out millions of dollars to our American political system like it’s candy.”

“And the rate of return they get on that would make a Wall Street hedge fund blush, and we have got to put a stop to that,” he added.

The investigation into the foreign-owned beef companies was prompted by President Donald Trump’s Nov. 7, 2025 executive order directing the DOJ to launch a probe into the nation’s largest meat packing companies. It referred in particular to “foreign-dominated conglomerates” that have been engaged in “artificially inflating prices at the expense of farmers, ranchers, and working families.”

The order was announced weeks after the DOJ concluded a multi-year investigation into major meatpackers that started during Trump’s first term.

Since November, the DOJ has reviewed more than 3 million documents and interviewed hundreds of people, including ranchers, cattlemen, producers and processors. R-CALF USA, a cattle producer advocacy group, praised the efforts by the DOJ, USDA, and White House.

Shad Sullivan, a cattle rancher who is also the organization’s property rights chair, said that the U.S. has lost more than 665,000 beef cattle operations since 1980, a figure that represents almost half of all producers. He attributed the decline to mergers and acquisitions, and the escalating influence of foreign meat conglomerates.

“Farmers, ranchers, and American consumers have suffered for too long at the hands of consolidated power,” Sullivan said.

Earlier this year, HHS and the USDA announced the launch of a national public awareness campaign that reminds farmers and ranchers of the “Product of USA” voluntary labeling standard that went into effect on Jan. 1.

For years, such a label did not mean what consumers thought it meant. Beef could be raised in another country, shipped to the U.S. as a carcass, cut or ground in America, and legally labeled a product of the U.S. because value was added through processing.

Consumers thought they were supporting U.S. ranchers when in actuality they were bolstering U.S.-based processing plants, many of which are owned by foreign interests.

Ground beef found in grocery stores can contain meat from multiple continents mixed together in a single package.

The “Product of USA” label is now reserved for meat, poultry, and eggs from animals that were born, raised, harvested, and processed in the U.S.

It is a voluntary program. Companies are not required to use the label. But if they do, they must meet the full standard. Beef from foreign countries cannot be sold in stores with a “Product of USA” label on it.

The issue of foreign ownership of American food companies has been an increasing concern in recent years, and last made headlines in 2014 when a Chinese company acquired Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the U.S. and also the world.

But now, for the first time, an administration is determined to take action.

President Trump’s executive order referred to the companies as “foreign-owned meatpacking cartels” —and Rollins has called the Brazilian-owned companies, JBS and National Beef, “a threat to America itself.”

With Rollins leading the charge, the government is taking that threat seriously.

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