Trump administration officials, Republican operatives, titans of the tech and insurance industries, wellness entrepreneurs, fading celebrities and a few women descended on the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC on Tuesday for the second annual Make America Healthy Again Summit — this time without the grassroots coalition of health freedom activists and anti-vaccine parents that gave the movement its name.
Panels at the event, which was viewable on a livestream, included conversations with industry leaders on psychedelics (about which Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is enthusiastic), cancer treatments (with the summit’s top sponsor, an experimental cancer test maker whose product is awaiting approval by the Food and Drug Administration), affordability (featuring insurance executives) and government regulation. Cabinet members and officials attended as moderators and presenters, including Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator, who was set to appear on a panel moderated by Russell Brand, the comedian who has pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of rape and sexual assault for which he will stand trial in London next month. Vice President JD Vance and Kennedy were slated to close the summit with a fireside chat.
MS NOW, along with other mainstream media, was not granted press credentials to cover the event.
For years, Kennedy has accused federal health agencies of being captured by corporations they are tasked with regulating. That same charge is now being aimed at the health secretary by his disillusioned supporters.
Dr. Robert Malone, a Covid-19 conspiracy theorist who sat on Kennedy’s remade vaccine advisory panel, called the MAHA Summit “a betrayal.”
“MAHA rose to prominence by condemning precisely this convergence of money, access, industry influence, and government power … Who exactly is MAHA for now?” he wrote on Substack.
Dozens of corporate sponsors were listed in the event’s program, including Walmart, artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic, and medical businesses Grail and Resmed. Many of the speakers and sponsors have active business before the federal government.
Bloomberg reported that MAHA Center, the nonprofit organizing the summit, advertised sponsorships running up to $300,000 that came with a speaking slot, influence over the conversation and a private dinner with Kennedy and Oz.
In the weeks leading up to the event, longtime Kennedy allies complained that MAHA, a self-described movement built on the backs of health-focused (and often anti-vaccine) activists to support Kennedy’s failed presidential bid, had been co-opted by political operatives and the very industries they had organized to fight.
“The MAHA Summit lineup does not reflect the issues that birthed the original MAHA movement and drove voters, especially women, to show up and vote for this coalition,” Kelly Ryerson, an anti-pesticide activist who goes by GlyphosateGirl, told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t recognize this version of MAHA.”
“We enabled Trump to win the presidency and Kennedy to become HHS secretary,” Mary Talley Bowden, a physician who advocates banning Covid vaccines, posted to X. “Why are they excluding our voices?”
MAHA has been embraced by the Trump administration heading into the midterms. But the movement’s originalists and its critics have started to sound alike.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana doctor who cast the deciding vote to confirm Kennedy and was ousted in his Republican primary, told Politico this month he had “very little respect” for MAHA.
“What starts as a movement ends as a racket,” Cassidy said.
If the divergent, often competing pet interests of the activists within MAHA made the movement hard to define, the structure behind the business of MAHA is murkier still. The summit was presented by MAHA Center, a nonprofit helmed by Tony Lyons, publisher of Kennedy’s books and other contrarian works. Lyons also runs MAHA Action, a separate nonprofit, and MAHA PAC, the rebranded super PAC that bankrolled Kennedy’s presidential bid and is now backing Republican candidates in the midterms. Tickets to the summit went to “MAHA members” who enrolled at the $6,000-a-year tier — a membership advertised and presented by Lyons’ MAHA Action but whose agreement is with MAHA Holdings, a separate entity with no public-facing website, about which little is known beyond its CEO, former tech entrepreneur Alex Hardy, and one board member: Kennedy’s 29-year-old son, Finn.
Finn was the summit’s first speaker.
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