The One Thing MAHA Voters Want That MAHA Can't Deliver
MAHA supporters rank cost first. The movement in power hasn't lowered a bill. That gap is the whole story.
My friend Dr. Craig Spencer spent the past year inside the MAHA movement and published “Public Health Needs MAHA: The field must swallow its pride and admit where the insurgent movement is right,” in The Atlantic today, arguing that public health should stop sneering at MAHA and start listening. We discussed it this morning.
Craig’s argument, in brief
The big picture. Public health has spent every day since RFK Jr. took office fighting fires: the vaccine schedule, peptides, staffing cuts. Craig wants the field to lift its head and ask what comes after this administration, so it can absorb the lessons instead of snapping back to 2019.
There are two MAHAs. A grassroots and what he calls “MAHA Incorporated.” Treating them as one thing is the field’s central mistake. The grassroots is a big tent of groups that, in his words, “don’t even like each other,” held together by decades of frustration.
It isn’t mainly about vaccines. The anti-vaccine wing is loud and litigious but small. And according to KFF polling, only about 1% of adults believe all the common vaccine myths, and among MAHA supporters the top concern is cost, with vaccines far down the list. He describes the anti-vaccine group as having “a small table in the tent, but the best microphone and the best sound system.”
His diagnosis. Public health went timid. It got “more comfortable with p-values than podiums,” and let “the demand for more data become an alibi for inaction.” People trust a movement that visibly fights for them over an institution that quotes stats.
His prescription. Show up and fight, visibly and non-partisan, on the issues that cross the divide: healthcare affordability, food quality, environmental exposures. Put money into state and local public health, where the shortfall is worst. And clean up Big Pharma entanglements because even the appearance of a conflict of interest is a liability.
What he concedes. MAHA-in-power hasn’t delivered on affordability, he grants, and on cost, the public trusts Democrats more. But, he told me, “we are part of the reasons for why MAHA exists,” and unless the field fixes what’s underneath, “there’s going to be another similar movement that comes from its ashes.”
Where I pushed back
The grievances predate the movement. There’s a difference between needing the movement and recognizing the grievances it names. Cost, food, and industry capture are decades-old concerns that most Americans share.
What MAHA hasn’t delivered. MAHA-in-power isn’t delivering on healthcare affordability and access, and Craig notes the public trusts Democrats more on this issue.
Common cause on MAHA’s turf points the field at the wrong target. The movement is loudest where health goes viral: raw milk, fluoride, the vaccine schedule.
The movement in power is doing the opposite of its stated cause. MAHA’s grievance is industry capture of the health agencies, but it has deepened the capture it claims to fight.
The conflict-of-interest scrutiny runs one way. MAHA holds Big Pharma accountable, but not Big Wellness.
You can’t out-feel a movement that isn’t bound by facts. If trust is a feeling and the other side isn’t constrained by evidence, an evidence-bound field loses that contest every time it fights on those terms. The way back is to deliver something people can feel in their household budgets.
The bottom line
The grievances are real, starting with the one thing the whole country already agrees on: the bill. If public health takes that on, MAHA loses its best argument. Skip it, and, in Craig’s words, the next movement is already coming.