ICLAC Newsletter – September 2025

RFK Jr and MAHA: dangerous, emboldened, and escalating

From The Lancet, August 23, 2025

The week beginning Aug 4, 2025 was the most dangerous and tragic week of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s tenure yet: a fatal CDC shooting by a gunman distrustful of COVID-19 vaccines, the cancellation of US$500 million in mRNA research funding, and his malicious call to retract a peer-reviewed Annals of Internal Medicine paper on vaccine safety. RFK Jr has built an increasingly powerful movement in Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). Either through incompetence or disinformation, the actions of this movement pose the greatest threat to the health of Americans and millions of people globally.

Kennedy cited lack of effectiveness, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines encouraging mutations in the pandemic, and a 181-page document that led him to conclude that the risks outweighed the benefits in further researching the mRNA vaccine platform. Later that week, Jay Bhattacharya, National Institute of Health Director, argued that the cancellation was because of public mistrust. But even this scientifically illiterate act of self-sabotage did not satisfy some of the MAHA base who dwell in a world inverted, where the familiar words of trust, data, and transparency are systematically used to discredit, dismantle, and undermine scientific institutions and individuals.

First, to the science. Multiple large, robust, and peer-reviewed clinical studies have concluded that millions of lives were saved during the COVID-19 pandemic from mRNA vaccines. Not by stopping transmission, but by preventing severe disease, hospitalisation, and death. There is no evidence that mRNA vaccines increase the virus mutation rate. The 181-page bibliography that Kennedy refers to contains many small, non-peer-reviewed studies and carefully selected paragraphs that do not discuss empirical data or major findings. The mRNA vaccine platform is the most effective tool we have in pandemic preparedness. The rapid and transitory nature of mRNA-encoded proteins that do not need to enter the nucleus or risk genomic integration makes them promising tools for infectious and non-infectious diseases such as cancer. Several areas continue to need refinement including: storability, stability, duration of expression, and targetability. Further research might achieve this. Like any intervention, mRNA vaccines are not perfect. There are known adverse events—a large observational study of 298 792 852 doses of mRNA vaccines given during the first 6 months of the US COVID-19 vaccination programme found the rate of myopericarditis to be 4·4 per million doses, and that most adverse events were mild and short-lived. The public health community must continue to communicate these adverse events transparently and weigh the risks and benefits for each population.

Second, to trust. It is true that trust in public health was damaged during the COVID-19 pandemic and that many US citizens are concerned because of the discordance between the amount the US spends on health care per capita (about $13 000) and the overall poor population health of Americans (the lowest life expectancy of any high-income country). It is understandable that the bold proclamations and blame that Kennedy and MAHA propagate may be seductive. Their movement is based on the premise that big pharma and big food profit from keeping Americans unhealthy. Undoubtedly there are many problems with an under-regulated US food system and a privatised health-care system. But a recent Pew Research Poll on who influences health policy and health priorities indicates that eight out of ten Americans agree that cancer, obesity, heart disease, and opioid addictions are key issues and that seven out of ten feel that health insurance companies are overly influential. Where then are the plans for universal health-care coverage or to regulate health insurance companies? To fund scientific endeavours to face these challenges? To regulate agriculture and the food environment? A second MAHA report is promised but as yet there is no indication that these plans will be proposed. Rather, Kennedy and some leaders of the MAHA movement choose to nurture mistrust through disinformation and misdirect genuine concerns to align with an anti-science and anti-vaccine agenda. Supported by a band of wellness industry entrepreneurs and influencers who sometimes directly profit from these diversions, this is an agenda that will do nothing for trust, science, or for health.

Although the health and science community must engage, and understand what has made this movement so beguiling, nobody should be under any illusions as to what it is—a dangerous pseudoscientific programme of work that supports a corrupt and unscientific wellness industry, seeks to discredit mainstream medicine, and portrays institutions and experts as enemies, not partners

Source: The Lancet, Volume 406, Issue 10505, 779