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The slow-motion humiliation of RFK Jr
HHS is in chaos and his MAHA movement looks like a spent force.
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Last week, Trump’s Food and Drug Administration just about tore itself apart in a paroxysm of confusion and chaos.
First, Commissioner Dr. Martin Makary resigned. He was replaced by Kyle Diamantis, a crony of Donald Trump Jr. who has no medical qualifications. Makary was soon followed to the exit by administrator Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, an anti-vax crank aligned with the rolling public health disaster that is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The turmoil at the FDA is a sign of the administration’s deeply unserious and incoherent approach to public health. That is not, obviously, something to celebrate.
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Trump’s catastrophically inadequate response to covid helped kill 1.2 million people in the US. In his second term he seems determined to ensure that the US is even more unprepared to face any and every public health crisis than it was in 2020.
At the same time, the instability at US public health agencies underlines the precarity of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, with all its snake-oil, fatphobia, and eugenic woo woo. MAHA never had a solid constituency on the right, and its support appears to have eroded further the longer the nation has stared into Kennedy’s beady, fanatic eyes.
The fall of Makary
The immediate cause of Makary’s departure was his opposition to fruit-flavored vapes, which he believed would encourage children to become addicted.
MAHA’s emphasis on natural lifestyles is an uncomfortable fit with vaping, to say the least, and Kennedy’s senior spokesperson Richard Danker also resigned last week over the issue. Trump, though, appears to have been swayed by industry lobbying — an example of corporate cronyism overruling ideology.
In addition to irritating the right’s corporate wing, Makary also enraged anti-abortion advocates by refusing to aggressively target and regulate the abortion drug mifepristone. Mifepristone is “safe, effective, and widely used” per the Guttmacher Institute. But abortion opponents want it banned whatever the research; Sen. Josh Hawley was enraged that Makary “froze out pro-life leaders” when they wanted to meddle in scientific decisions.
Actions like this earned Makary some praise from Democrats. Sen. Dick Durbin, for example, said that he hoped Makary would “inspire others” to say no to Trump on issues of conscience.
The problem, though, is that Makary’s conscience is a MAHA conscience, which means that it is profoundly broken. He, Hoeg, and Dr. Vinay Prasad — the FDA vaccine chief removed in March — pushed junk science anti-va