by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
October 25, 2026

Make America Healthy Again (aka “MAHA”) is dead.

In truth, it’s probably been dead for a while, but the death certificate records the day of its demise as October 15, 2026. That’s when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stepped up to the microphone and extolled the virtues of measles vaccines.

We’re having a global measles outbreak right now. It’s all over the world, and the measles outbreak is occurring because so many people went unvaccinated during the Covid pandemic. And this is something that Anthony Fauci, in fact, predicted. He said, “We’re going to kill more people from measles than we save from Covid, as we’re shutting down measles vaccination programs.” So now, six years later, we’re seeing that population. We have a global outbreak.

That the man who once warned about the dangers of childhood vaccines is now blaming the measles outbreak on a lack of vaccination is only surprising to those who haven’t been paying attention to Kennedy’s actual statements on this issue over the years.

So, what is the relationship between RFK Jr.’s vaccination stance and the stance of his supporters? Is this a betrayal of the MAHA movement? And, if so, what other “Make America Healthy Again” promises have been broken in the past two years?

Read on to find out!

THE BETRAYAL(S)?

Kennedy’s “surprising” measles vaccine endorsement shouldn’t be so surprising to anyone who actually listened to what candidate Kennedy was saying on the campaign trail in 2024. He has always been careful to stipulate that he “isn’t against vaccines” and that the measles vaccine is effective.

In fact, as Derrick Broze pointed out at the time, “The Most Important Moment from RFK Jr’s Confirmation Hearings“ was when he told Elizabeth Warren: “Senator, I support vaccines. I support the childhood schedule.”

To be fair to RFK Jr., it is not logically inconsistent to say that a vaccine could be effective for its intended purpose—e.g., for preventing measles infection—but not safe. It’s just that the vast majority of Kennedy’s supporters and those who eventually signed on to the MAHA coalition that helped put Trump in office do not share this “effective but dangerous” belief about vaccines, so to hear Kennedy yet again articulate this viewpoint feels like a betrayal.

And if that feeling of betrayal is uncomfortable, then MAHA supporters better brace themselves for a lot of discomfort. As it turns out, RFK Jr. has betrayed—or, at the very least, seemingly betrayed—his MAHA base many times over the past two years.

On the vaccine front, MAHA activists have been let down time and time again by the new HHS Secretary and the supposedly MAHA-friendly health agencies like the Food and Drug Agency (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that are nominally under his control.

Both FDA head Marty Makary and top FDA executive Tracy Beth Høeg were forced out of their positions earlier this year, shortly before the FDA approved Moderna’s new mRNA flu vaccine. That approval came despite the FDA’s own briefing document showing that recipients of this new mRNA monstrosity were four times more likely to experience a severe systemic reaction to the jab than those who received the regular (dangerous as it is) flu vaccine.

So incensed were MAHA activists by this mRNA vaccine approval that a gaggle of the movement’s most prominent voices signed an open letter to Kennedy expressing their disappointment in his failure to live up to his campaign promises.

As influential leaders within the MAHA and health freedom movements, we are writing to object to policies under your oversight related to the mRNA platform, and to call you to act on our policy goals.

While the centerpiece of the MAHA and health freedom agenda has been removal of mRNA shots, you have failed to take decisive action on this front despite overwhelming credible evidence to [sic] the harm of this technology. Instead, your policies related to mRNA technology are neutered and self-defeating, putting pregnant women and children at risk, misleading parents and eroding their rights, and failing to help those harmed by vaccines.

If you continue to ignore our central issue of removing the mRNA platform, the MAHA and health freedom movements will withdraw their support of you, and you will face the political consequences.

As I discussed in the most recent edition of Sunday Update, MAHA’s sense of disappointment in and betrayal by Kennedy’s mis-leadership is not limited to the vaccine issue.

Indeed, it’s hard for his one-time supporters to process the fact that the same RFK Jr. who once won an historic $290 million lawsuit against Monsanto over its cancer-causing glyphosate-based weed killer is the same RFK Jr. who has defended a Trump executive order that will boost glyphosate production.

And the same RFK Jr. who has warned about the health effects (and privacy violations) of wireless tracking devices is encouraging Americans to use wireless tracking devices to monitor their health.

Of course, those who continue to support the political MAHA movement in general and RFK Jr. in particular point to the progress that has been made in the health space during HHS Secretary Kennedy’s tenure.

They note, for example, that under Kennedy’s leadership, the FDA has “limited COVID boosters and updated shots mainly to high-risk groups rather than broad recommendations for healthy adults and children” and has started an “internal FDA re-evaluation of the CDC/ACIP schedule.”

Or they point to RFK Jr.’s recent keynote speech to the Children’s Health Defense Conference, in which he vowed to get to the bottom of the chemtrail phenomenon, as a sign of his continuing devotion to the “Make America Healthy Again” cause.

They’ve even sought to set the record straight on these apparent betrayals. For instance, RFK Jr.’s former chief speechwriter, Charles Eisenstein, asked Kennedy for clarification on his seeming embrace of wearable tracking technologies and received this response:

What I was trying to say is that I want this technology to be universally available as one of the ways people can get on top of their health. Of course I don’t want to mandate it. And the idea of everyone’s body being hooked up to a data center somewhere is horrifying. This data should be private, and when it is shared with the device provider it must be subject to health privacy laws.

When put in context and weighed against previous HHS chiefs, Kennedy’s record, supporters argue, has in fact been remarkably good. “After all,” these defenders retort, “he’s just one politician trying to reform an entire bureaucracy. Of course he has to make some compromises.”

But there’s a funny thing about that word “compromise”…

COMPROMISE(D)?

Remember that photo of Musk and Trump sharing a McDonald’s meal with RFK Jr. on Trump Force One right after the 2024 (s)election?

At first glance, it seems like a harmless hazing by the president-elect. It comes across to those not paying attention as just another instance of Trump and his playful sense of humour. Isn’t it funny, after all, to get “the MAHA guy” to eat a decidedly unhealthy meal to celebrate his political victory?

Upon closer inspection, however, the photo shows something much darker at play.

That meal was a humiliation ritual. Just months before his shameful supper, Kennedy had been bragging on a podcast that he had gone 3,057 days—more than eight years—without drinking a single Coca-Cola. His self-evident pride at that accomplishment, even getting his phone out to show the app where he keeps track of that statistic to the podcast host, provides a sad context for his “celebratory” McDonald’s dinner. Before he could be sworn in to the Trump administration, his Days Without A Coke counter had to go back to zero.

The meal was also an act of compromise. In order to assume his post as the head of HHS, RFK Jr. had to compromise himself, his values and even his own health.

This is not a trivial observation. It was symbolic not only of the compromises that Kennedy would be expected to make in his new role—compromises like supporting Trump’s EO on glyphosate—but of the fact that by making these political compromises, RFK Jr. would himself be compromised.

This is important because it’s what we’ve been told by everyone who has persisted in the MAHA hope-and-change movement since RFK Jr. first assumed office and started failing to deliver on his promises. “Give him time! He’s trying to turn around an entire bureaucracy around. He has to make some compromises in the meantime.”

Of course, they mean “compromise” in the positive sense. They mean the act of give-and-take that’s required to “get things done” in any democratic system.

“Of course he can’t just go in there and start de-authorizing mRNA boosters for infants! He can’t just ban glyphosate! He can’t tell people not to take the measles vaccine! Be real! He’s got to make compromises so that he can forward the MAHA agenda!”

But at what point does compromise stop being a positive thing? How many compromises does one have to make before one becomes compromised? And how many compromises can MAHA afford to make before MAHA isn’t MAHA anymore?

THE END OF MAHA?

I’m hardly the first one to raise these questions about MAHA and the act of compromise.

Heck, even Semafor is reporting on “The fight for MAHA’s soul,” pointing out that whatever RFK Jr.’s supporters hoped to achieve by joining forces with MAGA to catapult Kennedy into his top health role, it wasn’t this:

Kennedy is bouncing around Texas, New Hampshire, and Florida to tout the Trump administration’s work on chronic kidney disease, rural health efforts, and nutrition. Those are safe talking points for the midterms, but hardly the MAHA agenda Kennedy promised to deliver in Washington.

Even Calley Means, the MAHA “superstar” who introduced RFK Jr. to Trump, has now resigned from the Trump administration, apparently frustrated by the lack of progress on meaningful reforms for getting food dyes and additives out of the food supply.

The Means story itself provides an interesting window into the MAHA phenomenon.

After all, we should be asking ourselves: why is Means a MAHA “superstar”? Because, by introducing Bobby and Donald, he started the process that culminated with Kennedy suspending his own presidential campaign and signing up to join forces with Trump and the MAGA movement.

But not everyone sees Means as a superstar. His critics assert he was always just a “sleazy pharma PR conman“ who didn’t deserve the accolades and political position he received.

The rise of someone like Means—a forma pharmaceutical industry consultant—to such a high position in the MAHA movement is a perfect example of the danger I’ve been warning about since the beginning of the Make America Healthy Again movement. The danger, of course, is that MAHA will just become another political movement. “Don’t worry about your own health, folks. Let the politicians do it for you! If you vote for the right candidate, he’ll fight off the corporate interests and deliver you health from Mount Olympus.”

This is comic book nonsense. To the extent that MAHA is a political movement, it was always destined to fail. There is no “compromise” with Big Pharma and Big Food that ends with a win for the average person. There is no way to reform this beast from within or to use the power of the state to take away the wealth and power of the oligarchs. The system is not designed that way. It will not allow that to happen.

You would have thought that those who hoped for “reform from within” might have learned their lesson when the “humble foreign policy” of candidate George W. Bush became the never-ending War of Terror of President George W. Bush. Or when the “Hope and Change” of candidate Obama became the continuing War of Terror of President Obama. Or when the “Lock Her Up” and “Drain The Swamp” of candidate Trump became the “the Clintons are good people” and “Fill The Swamp” of Trump 1.0. Or when the “release the Epstein files” and “no new wars in the Middle East” of candidate Trump became the “Epstein is a Democrat hoax” and Iran War of Trump 2.0.

Now that RFK Jr. has demonstrated yet again that politicians are incapable of saving us from the dangers that the bought-and-paid-for political system has created, I wonder if people are finally ready to stop looking to Washington (or their country’s equivalent) for an answer to their problems.

Let me say it once more for the hard of thinking: To the extent that Make America Healthy Again (or Make EVERYONE Healthy Again, as I prefer) is a political movement, it will always be a complete and total failure.

But to the extent that it is a movement of free, sovereign individuals who are prepared to work together to take their health into their own hands, it can be an overwhelming success.

MAHA is dead. Long live MAHA!

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