MAHA Is a Bad Answer to a Good Question
About this episode
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s tenure at HHS — $500 million cut from mRNA vaccine research, $33 billion in budget cuts — prompts a reckoning with the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement. Physician Rachael Bedard (who worked on Rikers Island during Covid) and NYT columnist David Wallace-Wells argue MAHA is a bad answer to a good question: America's chronic-health crisis is real, but the movement's response is to attack science rather than address it. They revisit the pandemic's unprocessed trauma — 1.5 million American deaths, no systematic reckoning — and how Covid shattered institutional trust, sorting vaccine attitudes by party and fueling figures like Kennedy, whose environmental-lawyer past curdled into conspiracism. They sketch what a genuine answer would look like: prevention, research investment, and rebuilding trust, while noting the anti-establishment energy MAHA captured is not going away.