A new draft report of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Make America Healthy Again" plan was released on Friday, and got a brutal panning from not just health experts, but from a few people who actually share Kennedy's vision.
According to The New York Times, the draft "offered proposals on food and pesticides that fell short of what many in Mr. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement had hoped for." It called for additional research to help farmers produce the same crop yields with fewer pesticides, but stopped short of any hard restrictions on them, and also made no mention of seed oils, a hot-button issue for many pro-Trump health crusaders.
“There’s just some massive lobbying going on right now,” said Kennedy confidante Dr. Mark Hyman. “They don’t want to lose their chemical, seed and fertilizer billions and billions of dollars that they’re making.”
On the flip side, public health experts also criticized the report, with retired New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle blasting the document as full of "waffle words" and saying, “That’s a joke. They promised that the policy report would lay out the actions. I don’t see them.”
The tension in the draft reflects an ongoing divide in Trump's camp, noted the report: "In one camp are MAHA followers, who, like the health secretary, have warned that chemicals are poisoning Americans, and they are demanding swift action to clean up the food supply. In another are influential agriculture, food and drug interests that have traditionally backed Republicans and see the specter of a crackdown on the food supply as a threat to their industries, as well as to product prices and jobs."
Kennedy, a former environmental attorney turned anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who previously ran for president as an independent before throwing in with Trump's cause, has had a rocky start in promoting his MAHA movement.
Another health report released earlier this year by Kennedy's HHS was exposed as having been written by artificial intelligence, which hallucinated citations to several health studies that do not exist.