Setting Women Back to the 1930s

The US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wanted to be president. It didn’t take long in last year’s primary process for him to realize that was never going to happen. Everyone could see him for the idiot he is. So, he switched teams, stopped campaigning as a Democrat, and began making appearances with Felonious Punk. No one was terribly surprised that the move earned Kennedy a cabinet position. What surprised everyone was which department he was chosen to run.

Kennedy is not a doctor, nor has he ever played one on TV. In fact, most people would likely trust the medical advice of actor Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House character than Kennedy. Kennedy has never had any medical training. Kennedy is not even qualified to apply a bandage to a wounded area. Therefore, the idea of him giving out any kind of medical information borders on being illegal. Yet, that is exactly what he’s doing.

One of his biggest foul ups to date is recommending that parents of small children give them vitamin A rather than the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination. Too many parents listened to him. Can you guess what happened? Yes, it made the kids sick, and then they still got the measles.

Physicians at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, say they’ve now treated a handful of unvaccinated children who were given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.  Dr. Summer Davies, who cares for acutely ill children at the hospital, has said, “I had a patient that was only sick a couple of days, four or five days, but had been taking it for like three weeks.”

Let’s set the record straight: itamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles; however, two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine are about 97 percent effective. At high doses, vitamin A can cause liver damage; dry, peeling skin; hair loss; and, in rare instances, seizures and coma. So far, doctors at West Texas hospitals have said they’ve seen patients with yellowed skin and high levels of liver enzymes in their bloodwork, both signs of a damaged liver.

Kennedy is effectively spreading his message of disinformation through a clutch of tradwife influencers known as ‘MAHA Moms.’ (MAHA=Make America Healthy Again) These so-called wellness influencers echo Kennedy’s endless stream of false health claims, like that vaccines are dangerous, that getting the measles prevents cancer, and that esoteric diet fads like frying food in beef tallow will prevent disease. It’s all false.

As Thomas Edsall of the New York Times reported Tuesday, despite Kennedy and Punk’s rhetoric about keeping “our children healthy and strong,” the administration’s policies serve the opposite goal. The administration is rolling back decades of environmental protections that protect children from pollution exposure that is known to cause everything from asthma to cancer. As one expert told Edsall, “It is hard to imagine a more sweeping agenda to make Americans less healthy.” 

It’s not for nothing that much of the content in the wellness influencer sphere that Kennedy is tapping into starts blurring into “tradwife” content that openly advocates for patriarchal gender roles, where women live in submission to men and allegedly have no ambitions outside of serving their families. (In reality, “tradwife” influencers are performing housewifery for money online, which makes them closer to paid actors than actual housewives.) MAHA propaganda paints the grocery store as a viper’s nest of hidden poisons. Taken to an extreme — and social media is nothing if not a place to take everything to its extreme — one is led to believe the only way to keep children safe is to make all your food from scratch. Even buying a loaf of bread instead of baking your own from sourdough is too big a risk. And maybe you should consider moving to a farm and growing your own food? Whatever you do, you no longer have time for a life outside the home, much less a job. 

Kennedy and the MAHA moms romanticize the sick bed and the time-consuming maternal work of nursing a kid back to health. In response to the measles outbreak in West Texas, caused by the surge of vaccine refusals, Kennedy skated past the expert opinion to vaccinate to hype his view that the real solution is intensive mothering. He insisted that “we see a correlation between people who get hurt by measles and people who don’t have good nutrition or who don’t have a good exercise regimen,” for which there is no evidence. While paying lip service to the vaccine, Kennedy preferred to focus on recommending that mothers wait until the child gets the measles and then inundating the child with cod liver oil, vitamin A, and other intensive treatments. 

If it’s not clear how hyping shady supplements and sharing recipes contributes to the feminist project of fighting for gender equality, that’s because it’s not. On the contrary, the whole “MAHA mom” phenomenon is deeply sexist and part of the larger MAGA agenda of getting women out of the workplace and back, quite literally, into the kitchen. This is exactly the type of action laid out in Project 2025, meant to undermine feminism and build a stronger patriarch. At its core, the whole “MAHA mom” movement is misogynistic.

Thanks largely to Kennedy’s influence, on Monday, West Virginia banned foods containing most artificial food dyes and two preservatives, citing their potential health risks. Food industry groups have opposed the West Virginia law, as they have done with similar measures in California and other states.

“Unfortunately, not only will this bill ignore the F.D.A.’s rigorous science- and risk-based process of evaluating safe ingredients, it will also limit consumer access to affordable, nutritious and convenient food and beverage choices,” wrote Sarah Gallo, the senior vice president of product policy at the Consumer Brands Association, which represents packaged food and drink companies.

Public health experts still have serious concerns about Kennedy. Biomedical researchers say that if he really wanted to make America healthy, he would block Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency from targeting the nation’s scientific enterprise by reducing jobs and cutting grants.

Kennedy gathered his “MAHA moms” earlier this month for a roundtable event where they marveled as he pretended he couldn’t pronounce the ingredients listed on food packages. “Carrageenan, riboflavin, monosodium glutamate and 20 others that I can’t pronounce,” he said. No one mentioned the common names for these ingredients: seaweed, vitamin B2, and MSG, a common amino acid that has been demonized because it’s popular in Asian food. None are linked to the chronic illnesses, like diabetes, that Kennedy claims to be focused on. Some, like vitamin B, are necessary to survive. 

Kennedy is a snake oil salesman. His pitch sounds good, and he has plenty of pretty people around him, but buying into his nonsense is not only bad for everyone’s health, but it is also setting women back to the 1930s.

Don’t buy the lies.