Inside MAHA’s Power Meeting: Senator Rand Paul, Dr. Drew, Russell Brand, Cheryl Hines & More!

At a moment when trust in government health institutions is collapsing and the public is hungry for answers, MAHA Action launched its latest Media Hub meeting to discuss the issues shaping the future of American health policy. “We have so many good things happening right now, but you don’t read about them in newspapers, you don’t see them on television,” said MAHA Action president Tony Lyons, opening the August 6 Zoom call.

The event, titled Get the Facts. Take Action. Fix Our Food System, featured a headline-making lineup: Senator Rand Paul, Governor Patrick Morrissey, Cheryl Hines, Russell Brand, Dr. Drew Pinsky, and more. Together, they tackled urgent topics ranging from toxic additives and vaccine safety to SNAP reform and the bureaucratic stranglehold on public health innovation.

“If you care about something, you do it yourself,” Lyons told attendees. “We have the power. We can radically change the world.” He urged viewers to seize what he called a rare moment in history—one where public trust in government has eroded and the appetite for change is stronger than ever.

Lyons pointed to several recent victories he said were largely unreported by legacy media, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s cancellation of $500 million in mRNA contracts and a renewed effort to eliminate mercury from flu vaccines. He also credited Brooke Rollins with expanding SNAP waivers to six additional states, bringing the total to twelve.

Speakers Dr. Eric Berg and Gary Brekka joined the meeting and supported Lyons’ mission to come together and work harder to amplify the MAHA message in an era met with critique and censorship.

Berg said now is the time to help RFK Jr. “dominate the narrative,” warning that “millions of dollars are being spent right now on black propaganda” to stop reform.

“We need to amplify these messages… and we can all collectively make a huge change,” Berg said.

“This is not about building our individual platforms,” Brekka explained. “This is about building the message of MAHA and circumventing the media narrative so we can go directly to the people.”

Lyons welcomed U.S. Senator Rand Paul onto the virtual stage, who began by warning the audience about the dangers of scientific groupthink.

“Everywhere I go, my wife wants to wear her Make America Healthy Again hat,” Paul joked, before shifting to a serious critique of how science is handled in the United States. Citing Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Paul echoed the concern that “groupthink is a real danger to science,” adding, “Science requires skepticism and individual creative thought.”

Paul argued that the current funding structure for research—dominated almost entirely by federal agencies—limits dissent and suppresses originality. “When nearly all funding for science comes from the federal government, as it does today, science runs the risk of crushing dissent and originality,” he said. “And that’s what’s happened until we got Bobby Kennedy at HHS.”

Drawing parallels to historical figures like Galileo, Ignaz Semmelweis, and Dr. Zebediah Boylston, Paul reminded attendees that many once-ridiculed scientific pioneers faced institutional backlash. “For this insight,” he said of Semmelweis’ discovery that handwashing reduced maternal deaths, “he was arrested, he was put into an asylum, he was beaten, and ultimately died.”

Turning to the present, Paul said humility is essential to restoring public trust and ensuring honest evaluation of health policies. “In the current debate over vaccines, I readily admit that I don’t have all the answers. That humility, however, should be seen as an advantage, not as a hindrance,” he said. “Americans would have all been better off had Anthony Fauci showed a little bit of humility.”

Dr. Drew Pinsky jumped into the conversation by recalling the social pressures of the pandemic era—when skepticism was met not with discussion, but shame.

“In their signal of virtue, they want you to know that they would have fought Hitler in 1939,” he said. “When in fact, they would have been the prison guards. They would have been brown shirts. It is standing up to that that is actually the virtuous practice of the present moment.”

He compared the current censorship of scientific dissent to Galileo’s persecution, warning that we’ve “lost track somewhere of this delicate instrument that Francis Bacon brought us… which is the foundation of science.”

Pinsky voiced strong support for Kennedy, Jay Bhattacharya, and Marty Makary, calling their work “a daunting process,” but necessary to restore scientific integrity. “I need good, unadulterated research—not adulterated by money or influence or politics.”

Following Dr. Drew’s remarks, West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrissey took the virtual stage to highlight West Virginia’s recent public health wins—starting with a newly approved SNAP waiver that eliminates taxpayer-subsidized soda purchases. “We want to put the ‘N’ back into SNAP,” he said. “Soda does not qualify as anything remotely resembling nutrition.”

He stressed the importance of prevention over treatment, echoing MAHA’s broader goals. “Let’s put a little bit more money into prevention,” Morrissey said. “Maybe, just maybe, you won’t need all the money for people who are sick at the back end of it.”

Morrissey also praised Trump’s revival of the Presidential Fitness Test and detailed West Virginia’s investment in community wellness: “We have mountaineer mile walking paths in all of our state parks and we're getting out across every one of the counties. There's momentum [with] people getting out and walking. Can you just imagine if people start walking a mile or two miles a day, every little bit counts.”

Gray Delaney, Director of MAHA Implementation and External Affairs at HHS, joined the call and pointed out the obvious tensions in the movement.

“There’s been a lot of back and forth within the movement, especially on the vaccine issue, he said. “And I just would hope that we can stay united as a movement because I think there is an active effort to divide us.”

Delaney emphasized the significance of Secretary Kennedy’s recent decision to halt all mRNA research funding at BARDA. “This is a really historic reset,” Delaney said. “It’s an acknowledgment that the mRNA vaccines… failed to prevent infection. They failed to prevent transmission… and they failed to reduce the severity of COVID-19.”

He stressed that this pivot was not anti-vaccine, but rather a return to trusted scientific standards. “We are going to be relying on safe and effective vaccines that have been proven and use technology that we trust,” Delaney said. “The secretary, of course, is not anti-vaccine. He is committed to safe and effective vaccines.”

Lyons welcomed Russell Brand to the stage, introducing him as a charismatic “truth teller” and a vital voice in the MAHA movement.

“We should be free to pursue healthy living,” Brand said, framing the campaign as a “David versus Goliath style conflict” between ordinary citizens and powerful government-corporate interests.

He urged listeners to embrace moral clarity in the fight for health freedom, invoking spiritual armor: “Place on the girdle of truth… and the breastplate of righteousness.”

Brand closed with a cheeky nod to MAHA’s famously fit figurehead: “Let’s face it, Bobby Kennedy, our leader and our archetypal hero, spends most of his time without a shirt on.”

Brand made the cheeky comment while appearing on camera with his own olive green shirt nearly unbuttoned.

Cheryl Hines, speaking on behalf of her husband RFK Jr., thanked the panelists and audience for their continued engagement. “I know for a fact that Bobby loves working with you all,” she said. “I hear about it all the time in a very good way.”

She emphasized the importance of controlling the narrative outside traditional media. “We cannot rely on the news, cable outlets to cover a story or cover the news that’s with MAHA in a way that’s fair and that is true necessarily,” she said. “Or they highlight what they want to, or don’t report it at all.”

Hines reminded listeners of their collective impact. “Tony was telling me that the people that we have here right now… you can reach over 400 million people,” she said. “That’s a lot of MAHA spirit.”

Lyons closed the call in agreement with Delaney, by urging unity across the movement: “We all need to work as a team. We all need to find ways that we connect to each other and not try to look for ways that we disagree with each other.”

He told attendees to watch for an email with “assets from Gary Brekka, Eric Berg, Russell Brand… so that you can repost them,” emphasizing, “That’s where our power really comes from… we can only do it if you all get involved.”

He also reminded everyone to subscribe to The MAHA Report on Substack and “start to get ready for the pesticide immunity liability shield wars that are coming up.”

The next MAHA webinar is scheduled for August 27, with weekly meetings returning in the fall.

“This is a war,” Lyons claimed. “We can win it, but we need all of you to be part of it.”

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