Tony Lyons: Because of MAHA, Millions of Americans Are Quietly Changing Their Lives, Becoming CEO’s of Their Own Bodies

MAHA Action president touts MAHA’s wins, acknowledges progress is slow: ”MAHA has to be bigger than any one administration,” he said.

[Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action, delivered the below words at the start of the week’s Media Hub on Wednesday.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the progress is real.

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

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

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

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

The Presidential Fitness Test is back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL)

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

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