US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and JD Vance shared a stage at the MAHA Summit in Washington DC.Credit: Alex Wroblewski/AFP/Getty
Washington DC
Social-media influencers and anti-ageing entrepreneurs mingled with top US government officials, including the head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), at an exclusive event steps from the White House last week. The meeting’s purpose was to discuss the future of health in the United States.
Organizers called it the MAHA Summit, referring to US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s signature ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement. Attendees included Kennedy, US vice-president JD Vance, NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya, US Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary and the food activist Vani Hari, who blogs under the name ‘Food Babe’. Sessions at the summit, which Nature attended, covered a wide range of health-related topics, including psychedelics, brain implants and anti-ageing therapies. Academic researchers or clinicians were not among the speakers at the sessions, which were peppered by comments critical of the medical establishment.
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The conference showcased the influence of the MAHA movement, whose supporters say there is a chronic-disease epidemic in the United States that they blame in part on corruption in the food and pharmaceutical industries. To combat this epidemic, supporters advocate lifestyle choices, such as improving sleep and taking dietary supplements.
The movement has ascended rapidly from a loose network of Kennedy supporters into a political force that Vance, speaking at the summit, called “a critical part of our success in Washington”. The event also drew officials from corporate heavyweights, such as Walmart and Google, and biotechnology firms, such as Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, New York.
“We didn’t have anything like this” said Robert Redfield, who led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2018 to 2021, during Trump’s first term, told Nature at the summit. “Bobby [Kennedy] has gotten industry to sit down with him.”
Warm praise
The nearly eight-hour summit featured remarks by several officials in Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services. Among them were Bhattacharya, who said that the “MAHA movement is an absolutely incredible thing to me”. He added: “I have waited my entire life to see this movement come.”
Other speakers included mixed-martial-arts promoter Dana White and actor and comedian Russell Brand. Attendees also heard health advice from Bryan Johnson, a Silicon Valley multimillionaire known for his anti-ageing ‘biohacks’, such as receiving plasma transfusions from his teenage son, and his view that his generation might be first to never die.
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Throughout the event, speakers criticized established scientific and medical institutions. Both are frequent targets of Kennedy, who founded Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit organization in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, that is known for its anti-vaccine advocacy. Among these speakers was Bhattacharya, who said that the NIH, the world’s largest biomedical-research funder, has focused too heavily on small scientific steps instead of “disruptive” or “innovative” research.
“What puts lives at risk is doing research that’s incremental,” Bhattacharya said. “All it does is advance the careers of the researchers that do it. It results in publications that don’t get used and aren’t replicable.”
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Makary decried “groupthink that again and again led us astray”, citing as an example public-health recommendations against eating saturated fat. (Kennedy has suggested that saturated fats are part of a healthy diet; the US government has, for decades, recommended limiting saturated-fat consumption.) “We got ‘saturated fat causes heart disease’ wrong for 50 years,” Makary said. “That’s a war we’re going to end.”
