MAHA's response to the measles outbreak has been horrific, though expectable. Yet RFK Jr's op-ed, in which he advocated for the MMR vaccine, ripped apart his coalition—briefly.
Derek looks at the responses to Bobby's moment of clarity, then contemplates what MAHA really wants now that their champion is the bureaucracy.
Show Notes
Dr Jessica Knurick’s video
Vitamin A For Measles: Kevin Klatt
Measles is not a harmless illness — complications include brain damage, immune amnesia, and death
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On Sunday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. penned an op-ed for Fox News titled, Measles Outbreak is a Call to Action for All Robert F. Kennedy Jr. penned an op-ed for Fox News titled, Measles The subhead, which he likely did not write, stated MMR vaccine is crucial to avoiding potentially deadly disease.
I say it's likely that he didn't write it because editors usually write headlines and subheads, and I'll return to that.
The one line that jumped out in the article, and that ended up creating an alt-med fury online in response, is this.
Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons.
Yeah, and this is about as far as he would go to admitting that vaccinations work, but for his anti-vax coalition, the same one that he's helped build as founder of Children's Health Defense and his relentless work spreading vaccine misinformation, including, we should note, the debunked theory that the MMR vaccine causes autism, well, this was quite a betrayal to them.
Sort of.
I'll get to the mixed responses and deflections in a moment.
I'm Derek Barris, and you're listening to a Conspirituality Brief, Maha's Soft Eugenics.
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One thing I've learned in years of covering Bobby on this podcast is that the man cannot help himself.
In the same op-ed, he claims that, quote, Then he links to a 2010 Journal article that was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is rather funny given that this is what he said about Bill's work in October at a Turning Point PAC speech.
Bill Gates had just donated $50 million to Kamala Harris' campaign.
It was a dark money donation.
He didn't intend for it to be public.
He's been indicted in the Netherlands for lying to the public about the COVID vaccine.
You think that he wants to go to trial here in the United States of America?
You think maybe that's one of the reasons he chose to give $50 million to Kamala Harris?
But, you know, if Bill does something that helps Bobby's message, what's the harm, really?
But...
Let's look at it.
Does this journal article actually support the idea that vitamin A prevents measles mortality?
Sort of.
When given to malnourished children in Africa with two very specific doses of 200,000 international units for children and 100,000 international units for infants, there is reduced mortality.
But that's it.
And it doesn't necessarily mean it's the right protocol for anyone except malnourished children in Africa.
I'm going to link to Kevin Klatt's article, Vitamin A for Measles, in the show notes.
But first, I'll read two caveats that he offers about Bobby's recommendation here.
Just to note, Kevin has a PhD in molecular nutrition from Cornell University.
He's also an assistant research scientist and instructor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences and Toxicology at UC Berkeley.
He's been featured on this podcast before, and next week he's actually going to be on my new podcast, Clarity Lab, so he knows what he's talking about.
Here he is, quote, Then he goes on, second caveat.
The doses used here are very high, largely because vitamin A is a fat-soluble vitamin that can be stored and mobilized.
The units here are a bit weird, but for reference, the daily recommended intakes for children are 300 to 700 micrograms of retinol.
The 200,000 IU international units being used in measles treatment recommendations equates to 60,000 micrograms, 1 to 200 times the daily recommended dose to maintain vitamin A levels in the body.
I have to call this out because we are in the era of carnivore influencers selling people encapsulated beef liver extolling the benefits of vitamin A.
Despite liver being a rich source of vitamin A, it comes nowhere close to the doses we're talking about here.
are.
Back to Bobby.
That is not the only slipperiness in his op-ed, but I'll leave it at that, because on Tuesday, two days later, he appeared on Fox News to discuss the measles outbreak with the physician, Dr. Mark Siegel.
And Bobby said this.
They have treated most of the patients, actually, over 108 patients in the last 48 hours.
And they're getting very, very good results.
They report from budesonide, which is a steroid.
It's a 30-year-old steroid.
And clarithromycin and also cod liver oil, which has high concentrations of vitamin A and vitamin D. Did he mention vaccines once?
No, of course not.
Besides that op-ed, which he only shared on his government social media account, not a peep about the efficacy or necessity of vaccines anywhere else.
And no, cod liver oil ain't doing shit for measles.
Ashish Jha, who served as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under President Biden for over a year, replied to Kennedy's interview by writing, quote, Steroids don't treat measles.
No, cod liver oil doesn't treat measles.
Vitamin A helps in poor countries where kids have vitamin deficiency.
Managing measles is about prevention, vaccines, not quack treatments.
While Kennedy has limited his mention of vaccines, that single mention in the op-ed was enough to infuriate a number of Maha stans.
You have Health Ranger, also known as Mike Adams, who founded the pseudoscience clearinghouse Natural News, who said that RFK is, quote, now practically a spokesperson for the vaccine industry.
Then he took it back a few hours later, telling his 282,000 followers he still has faith in Bobby.
The next day, he shared an article...
From Robert Malone's Substack.
Now, you probably remember Robert, the self-proclaimed inventor of mRNA technology who went rogue during COVID. Now, that claim isn't true, of course, because hundreds of people contributed to the development of mRNA over decades.
And while he was one of them, his ego definitely precedes him.
The article was written by Canadian actress Sophia Karstens.
And it's called The War on RFK Jr. Why They're Desperate to Silence Him.
The subhead, which I'm pretty certain is written either by Sophia or Robert, since this is not a media organization, is They Want You Panicked.
Here's the real agenda behind the measles scare.
The article is long, and it's tiring and completely expectable, but this graph jumped out, quote, I probably don't need to say it, but I will out of the gate.
That the headline of RFK Jr.'s op-ed was not reflective of the contents, which in my experience indicates the headline was added later, possibly by opposition to mislead the public into a narrative not inherent in Bobby's actual words.
Proverbial they do this to him a lot.
Now, as I flagged, Bobby likely didn't write the headline or the subhead.
but Fox News, who two days later gave him a softball interview about the outbreak, is now the opposition?
All right, I want to flag one more response that I find telling before I pivot to what I think Maha is really doing right now in the fuller, broader picture of the Trump administration.
And this one comes from Green Med Info founder Douglas Sayer G., who penned a piece titled, The Maha Crisis.
Why our health freedom depends on us, not any one leader.
He then tries to coin his own acronym in the subhead.
I'm into reading subheads today.
Quote, No one is coming to save us.
It's up to us to reclaim health freedom and for you to make yourself healthy again.
My, my, ha?
You know, rolls right off the tongue there.
Last week, I shared a clip of Sayer as a guest on the Children's Health Defense TV show, where he was advocating for getting infected with measles as an immunological rite of passage and making claims that it's only protective against certain forms of cancer.
I shared that on the Conspirituality Instagram page, so I'll put it in the show notes here.
In reality...
Where most of us live, there's research on using measles in oncolytic virotherapy to selectively infect and kill cancer cells.
There's also a specific strain of measles called the Edmonston strain, and that is now being studied to target cancer cells.
It's always like a little bit of truth, right?
That always happens in wellness world.
None of this has anything to do with natural measles infection, which is what Sayer and others are promoting.
And the therapies I just mentioned are still being tested.
There is absolutely no research supporting the idea that natural measles infection protects against any types of cancer.
In his essay, Gee talks about attending Bobby's confirmation hearings.
And he physically cringed when Bobby swore to uphold the current vaccine schedule, saying that the phrase safe and effective was disproven due to the dark chapter of history known as COVID-19.
The NG talks about what Maha really entails.
I'm going to read two paragraphs.
And yet, if this moment proves anything, it is this.
No government.
No Maha commission.
No HHS secretary, Bobby included, is going to save us.
We must save ourselves.
The responsibility to reclaim our health, assert our bodily sovereignty, and dismantle the lie that vaccines are unequivocally safe and effective fall squarely on us.
The only way MAHA will succeed is if we make ourselves healthy again first.
All capital, so that's MOHA. Another one here.
Okay, second paragraph.
Perhaps this latest twist of fate is teaching us a painful but necessary lesson.
Politics is a meat grinder and one of our own, someone to whom many of us have tethered our hopes, is caught in its relentless gears.
We feel the pressure, the squeeze, even the pain of it, but maybe that's not a curse.
Maybe it's a call to action.
If we don't pull ourselves free, we risk watching this machine grind not just Bobby but our movement and the lives of countless children into dust once more.
The time to act is now.
Extrapolating from that, I wonder if G also thinks Fox News is now the opposition, part of the machine.
And this makes sense given anti-vaxxers share qualities with staunch religious fundamentalists who only accept one version of reality, which is theirs, and anything or anyone in opposition to that must be compromised or have another agenda, because in their eyes, Maha is pure, And beneficial and truthful?
Obviously.
So, that's in no small part how Maha stans have reacted to Bobby not regurgitating the prescribed rhetoric of anti-vax fervor.
Rhetoric that he, in large part, created and refined.
But, I'm continually left with a nagging question.
What does Maha really want?
Like, what's the endgame?
I've speculated on this question for years, before Maha was a thing just talking about this movement and Bobby's role in it, and a few angles always come to mind.
For wellness influencers, this sort of rhetoric often leads to some marketing downline where they sell supplements, courses, workshops, or access to their bespoke websites.
There's another strain of influencer and activists who just do this because they really believe in it and they don't actually have financial entanglements.
And of course, people who do have financial entanglements might also believe in it.
I'm not saying they don't.
Then you have someone like Bobby, who we know made $10 million in 2024 from legal fees associated with vaccine lawsuits that he's involved with, from speaking fees predominantly for his anti-vax work.
And from his former salary from his non-profit Children's Health Defense.
All of that is on an individual level.
I really believe that some anti-vaxxers really believe their rhetoric, regardless of the overwhelming evidence of vaccine safety and efficacy from domain experts who've spent their lives studying and researching this field.
I also really believe that some influencers and activists don't really believe what they're saying, but they see an opportunity.
And then there's a radicalization pipeline that might start with opportunism, but actually turns into fervent belief.
But what about on a systemic level?
As the first part of this episode shows, Maha isn't separate from the U.S. government any longer.
Kennedy is now the bureaucracy.
And what I rarely hear from Maha stans is the fact that Maha is completely woven into MAGA. So what does that entail?
A few weeks ago, Dr. Jessica Nurik, she's a dietician with a PhD in nutrition science, and she's one of my favorite follows on social media.
She broke down one angle that deserves both appreciation for what it is, and from the perspective of this episode, a little bit more unpacking from my angle.
I want to play it in full because it's worth listening to, and then...
I'll conclude with my thoughts on the topic and you can find the full video in the show notes as well.
Last week it was announced that thousands of scientists and public health experts at the CDC, FDA, and NIH would be fired.
At the same time, NIH research funding is being significantly cut, gutting university budgets and making public health research more difficult.
The administration is justifying this with the unfounded claim that science has been skewed and needs to be rebuilt, which is similar to the language that they used in the new Make America Healthy Again executive order.
But let's be clear, this is not about fixing science.
This is about dismantling public research so that they can privatize it, which is often the goal.
Privatization is a pattern.
They want to privatize health care and education and the postal service and now scientific research.
They'll say it makes things more efficient or reduces waste.
But it also increases inequality, prioritizes profits over public well-being, increases corporate influence over what gets researched and what doesn't, and shifts priorities from public well-being to profit-driven topics.
Here's the playbook.
Step one, erode trust in public science.
Claim health agencies are corrupt and science is skewed.
Step two, defund public science and fire experts.
We're already seeing thousands of people fired and significant funding cuts.
And step three, privatize research, giving billionaires and corporations control over what gets studied and what doesn't.
Here's the problem.
When science is dictated by profits, it stops serving the public good.
Medical breakthroughs become even more exclusive, and the best treatments will go to those who can afford them, not those who need them.
And misinformation in pseudoscience gets legitimized.
For example, last week, Nicole Shanahan, RFK Jr.'s former running mate, offered $3.5 million to researchers willing to publish papers linking vaccines to unproven medical conditions that they associate with autism, which is a deeply unethical move that funds science with a predetermined agenda rather than genuine inquiry.
And this isn't just a one-off billionaire funding bad science.
This is an orchestrated effort to shift even more research from public welfare to private profit.
Callie Means, a key Maha organizer, admitted this in a post on Instagram last weekend.
He said the goal of this administration is to rejuvenate science, to get to the bottom of why we're getting sick, and ensure companies and people who reverse those trends make a lot of money.
They're not strengthening science.
They're taking it over.
They're reshaping science to serve private profits.
If we let public science disappear, we lose research that serves everyone.
We're counting on people to not be paying attention.
But the more we recognize what's happening and push back, the harder it becomes to justify.
I can't tell you how many times I've been interviewed by press outlets in which I was asked about what we can do to improve health.
And I've said we first have to address the social determinants of health.
And that quote rarely makes the cut.
A few outlets actually told me why.
Public health isn't sexy.
It doesn't catch readers.
This type of response gives us a clue to at least one reason why we're in the situation we're in with health and healthcare and public health.
Because if you can't educate people on the importance of communal health, then you're opening the door wide open for grifters selling supposedly individualized solutions.
Another question I've been asked in recent months is what Bobby gets right.
And I've always given the same response.
He says he wants to get rid of pharma lobbying in D.C., and he says he wants to end direct-to-consumer pharma advertising.
I always give the following caveat when I say this answer.
He's not going to do those things.
In fact, he can't do those things.
Since the 1990s, the pharma lobby has benefited the Republicans more than the Democrats.
And to be super clear, I don't think most Democrats would vote to end the pharma lobby either.
Congress just isn't going to turn off that cash cow.
And if pharma has their ear, they're not going to end D2C advertising, even though America is only one of two nations on Earth alongside New Zealand that allows pharma companies to market directly to citizens.
And in the month that Bobby has been in charge, I haven't heard him mention those objectives one time.
They're not listed in the Maha executive order that Jessica cites in her video either.
I mean, there is some boilerplate language about, quote, eliminating undue industry influence.
But do you trust Congress to define undue in this context?
I certainly don't.
Not from the largest lobby in D.C. And the language is purposefully vague because that's how Kennedy operates.
It's the vagueness of his op-ed around vaccines.
He's very specific when he's talking about vaccines being a personal choice, but not about their safety and efficacy.
And in his follow-up interview, he's very clear about things like cod liver oil, but he doesn't mention vaccines once.
At the time of this recording on Thursday afternoon, the Texas outbreak is up to 159 cases, 22 hospitalizations, and one death.
And we actually risk losing the status of having eliminated measles in this country.
That's a big deal.
But the other problem for Maha is Project 2025. While Jessica doesn't cite this document specifically, it is the playbook for this administration.
That 900-page document is a privatization wet dream.
During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy specifically said he doesn't think the American people want universal health care, but they want choice.
First off, bullshit.
Plenty of us want universal health care.
That's also pure Heritage Foundation language right there.
You have school choice being code for funneling taxpayer money into Christian schooling.
We've done numerous episodes on that.
And you have health choice, meaning we're going to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid and drive everyone to the private market because it's all written in black and white in a document that's been freely available online since 2023. And this is the playbook that Kennedy is now part of.
The opposition to achieving good health is now coming from inside the House.
And it's not just Kennedy.
Here's Dr. Oz speaking at the National Governors Association winter meeting last month.
Now, when you go home today, what should you do?
I think you ought to think about 15-minute physicals.
Your local hospitals will fund these.
They're incredibly inexpensive to run.
You can screen thousands of people for almost nothing.
And you allow a conversation to take place in more of a festival-like setting.
It's not scary.
And I mentioned earlier that almost everybody who comes to our 50-Minute Physicals has a job, but a lot don't have insurance.
Give them a way of crawling back out of the abyss of darkness, of fear over not having the health they need, and give them an opportunity, because they don't have the right to health, but they have the right to access, a chance to get that health.
They don't have the right to health.
You catch that?
Of course they don't.
Not in the private market.
He's speaking about free monthly health clinics that occur all over the nation, though predominantly in the South, which is often the only chance those citizens have of seeing a doctor at all.
Ever wonder why the South has the highest rate of obesity and the poorest health outcomes in the country?
Maybe it's because a lot of those people have to wait in a festival-like environment for hours on end, sometimes not even being seen, and then they meet overworked and exhausted medical professionals for 15 minutes to get basic screenings?
The Fyre Festival model of healthcare is not the panacea Oz makes it out to be, but he too is now charged with implementing Project 2025's goal of privatization, and boy, he is on board with that.
And that's only going to worsen health outcomes, which is where we come to the idea of Maha being a vehicle for soft eugenics.
Eugenics is a loaded term.
It comes from the ancient Greek.
Two words, the first good and well, the second meaning come into being.
You can argue that the idea of a genetic calling of the species has been around for a very long time.
There's historical references dating back to Sparta.
The modern eugenics movement started in the late 19th century in Europe, and Americans, they sure did take to it.
To be very clear, I don't think Kennedy or any of the wellness influencers I've criticized are eugenicists in terms of advocating for the death of a group of people or even suggesting fetuses with genetic problems should be killed.
That's not what we're discussing here.
That type of language predominantly remains over on the fringes of ethno-nationalism.
But it very much fits the bill of soft eugenics.
Which is more of a shrug and sigh than a battle cry.
We've been hearing this type of rhetoric from anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers since COVID, but to be honest, it pervaded wellness speak for generations.
When you hear an influencer claim that someone died with COVID, which is a thoroughly debunked idea, instead of saying they died from COVID, you're hearing soft eugenics.
Talk about only malnourished children dying of measles and healthy children have nothing to worry about.
I mean, it's an immunological rite of passage.
You're hearing the language of soft eugenics.
And when you hear the blaming of chronic disease on fat people who don't know how to control their urges, which is something I've seen for years in the wellness landscape, yeah, you're hearing soft eugenics.
It's this moralizing of wellness, this idea that your health is only dependent on you, and if you can't achieve it, you've failed.
Because there's a level of unacknowledged privilege that's infected wellness for a long time.
It might be genetic privilege.
It's often financial privilege.
But what you're really hearing is someone say, you?
You're not me.
And when you unpack that sentiment, It actually translates to, I've had a set of opportunities and access that I'm blind to because I just assume everyone has the same opportunities and access.
This is the mentality that often leads to assuming biohacking protocols and untested supplements are the keys to optimal health, not money or geography or social status.
That blindness leads to a set of assumptions about health that doesn't reflect the biological, social, historical, or geographical factors that all play into individual health.
And if you're that far off the mark with individual health, well, public health is definitely going to elude you.
That's also what allows you to look at one of the greatest health interventions in human history and say, no, no, no, no.
I'm not going to believe centuries of scientific rigor testing and, yes, failures, to where we've come to today.
Instead, I'm going to stand firm in my conviction that cod liver oil is a better therapeutic than a vaccine.
And if someone dies from natural infection, I'm going to find a reason why they couldn't possibly be healthy in the first place, instead of recognizing that measles is a vicious disease that can cause a lot of chronic disease, blindness, and at the extreme, kill people, mostly young blindness, and at the extreme, kill people, mostly young children.
Like I said, a sigh, but a rather pernicious one.
And if this Maha movement is going to hold press conferences jerking one another off because they got a food dye removed from a cereal, but refuse to even talk about one of the worst measles outbreaks in our nation in a generation, well, yeah, yeah, that's the language of soft eugenics.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to run off to Costco to get my MMR vaccine.
I'm going to be 50 in a few months, and given that my insurance doesn't cover tighter tests, I decided to be proactive and just get another vaccine because, to be straight up, I don't fucking trust people right now and I need to protect myself.
