The past few weeks have been nothing but discouraging for those of us who helped create the Make America Healthy Again movement, including a silly executive order on glyphosate that feels anathema to what we have fought for. I’d be lying if I said that my heart hasn’t been bent toward repentance for my part in the whole thing. I helped champion Bobby Kennedy as a campaign volunteer, and when he joined up with then-candidate Donald Trump, I reluctantly decided that the trade-offs were worth what I believed Kennedy could advocate for within the walls of a Trump White House: the best fixes for a very sick and broken nation. 

Yet I found myself recently, and reluctantly, headed to the citadel of arrogance: Washington (well, Arlington, Va., to be more specific). At the invitation of Brinda Adhikari — one of the hosts of the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” — I attended the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health’s annual meeting, where I spoke on a panel about engaging in civil conversation in a session called “A Dialogue Between Academic Public Health and MAHA.”

My arrival at the hotel ahead of the conference had me wondering if I had made the right choice. These were the adversaries who had frustrated me during the pandemic. Despite my disappointment with the Trump administration on a host of issues, I still believe that MAHA is a good movement and that public health and health care in general need a wholesale revision if they are ever to become trusted institutions again. I also realized that many in the room were likely the unfortunate recipients of the cuts that the Trump administration, under RFK Jr.’s leadership, had implemented. I felt an uneasiness about standing up in front of a room that, in all likelihood, saw my advocacy for Kennedy as part of their own moment of tumult. 

The next morning, on my way down to the lobby to get coffee, I walked past former NIH Director Francis Collins. I recognized him instantly and couldn’t help but trace my thoughts to Covid and all of the nefarious stories I associated him with. For a moment, the scenes of lockdowns and vaccine mandates all flashed in my head. I don’t belong at this conference, I told myself.

But when the plenary session began, I sensed something really amazing: The room wanted to listen to what my fellow MAHA advocates and I had to say. I am certain that the skeptics were scattered amongst the masses, but as we discussed the challenges of public health interfacing with MAHA and the Kennedy leadership at HHS, the room seemed earnest, willing to hear what was being said. 

It wasn’t a debate, and I wasn’t there to convince anyone that what I was saying should become the new gospel of health. But I could see in the eyes of many in the crowd an acknowledgement that what had happened over the past decade, particularly because of the pandemic, needed to be addressed.

We spoke for an hour, and when it was over, many audience members gathered around the stage to talk to my MAHA colleagues and me and find out more. I was thrilled to see it. No angry, in-your-face, Twitter-like battles were instigated. There was a real sense that we should be learning from one another in this moment, rather than building our bulwarks. 

In my most honest of moments, what I want from the medical community is the chance to trust it again. We need medicine to function in all the glory of its artistry. Patient care is one of the most necessary and humane interactions in all of humanity. So its politicization has been the worst possible outcome to a choose-your-own-adventure that never had to find its way down paths of distrust. 

Though the past few years have made me highly skeptical of medicine, I’ve benefited from it. My oldest son was born three weeks early, and without the brilliance of doctors and the care of nurses, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the first month of his life, I most certainly would have been burying my child instead of celebrating his ever-flourishing life.

I know we need medicine and medical caregivers as a functional and good society. I also know we have a very broken system that seems to me, as an outsider looking in, to be beyond repair.

But in that room, I realized something deeply moving. The doctors and educators in that place are interested in the care and health of all with whom they interface. They aren’t interested in being pill pushers or happy that our country is morbidly obese. They see the same issues I do, and want them to be better.

It’s the people in power, the ones who work behind the scenes lobbying with money and influence, who want the rest of us to fight about the unresolvable problems. The corporate interests and beneficiaries of the current version of medicine love it when we argue about vaccines and Big Pharma, because it means they get to keep on keeping on — doing exactly what they have always done. 

But that room I was in was filled with the people who can make the outcomes I — we all — want. They are the ones who are interfacing with the most downtrodden of our society, with the emergencies of bad choices, and the extraction that our mercantile system perpetuates and celebrates in its boardrooms.

Those advocates are the ones who have to sit with a forlorn woman from Mississippi and try to help her understand what is happening to her body, and why she’s feeling sick. They are the ones who have to try to educate people about junk food and processed fillers that are destroying their metabolisms and impeding their full flourishing capabilities. They are the ones who have to try to explain why it is their Medicare or Medicaid won’t help them pay for the preventive measures they would benefit from, but only will allow them the money they need for a pill or a procedure once the disease has progressed too far. These are the ground troops for a war that must be won, and MAHA needs them.

During the discussion, emergency physician Craig Spencer asked for a show of hands.

“Who wants to eliminate processed foods for their children?”

“Who wants toxins to be out of our water and food supply?”

“Who wants good access to healthy, whole foods?”

There wasn’t a hand that didn’t raise. 

The people of MAHA want those same things. They don’t want Kennedy relegated and boxed into a corner, simply playing with his food dyes. The people of MAHA actually want a government that acts as a watchdog against the enrichment of corporations by the extraction of human capital through their cycles of drug-chasing-drug remediation. The grassroots people aren’t interested in the corporate excuses that donors get to perpetuate on the people so they can continue to spray our food supply with who knows what kind of witch’s brew. They reject the idea that the administration gets to tiptoe around the ongoing perpetuation of a broken system with a lengthy tweet in order to justify industrialized farming. 

But this conference gave me a glimmer of hope: What if MAHA and public health actually came together on the things we know we could easily tackle? What if both groups ignored the small-minded prison of petty politics?

What if both groups agreed that the government should be a stopgap for a lack of funding for research and testing, and eliminate the conflicts of interest that the current system is plagued by? 

What if MAHA and leaders in public health said that Medicare and Medicaid should focus on preventive care and access to great food?

What if the education system taught kids how to cook good food and grow a garden, even on the balcony of a tenement apartment? What if society saw health and education as synonymous endeavors, where kids learn just as much about how to take care of themselves as they do about calculus?

And what if MAHA and public health agreed that being a whole person, spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was the job of our society?

The doctors and nurses from public health who hold the hands of a sick child aren’t the ones with whom MAHA should be adversaries. Instead, they — we — should work together. To build a bridge between the two groups to put the people back in their rightful place at the head of the republic. A place where their discretion is informed, where they are self-caring, where they have the capacity to take care of themselves and their fellow man. Public health is a key ally in this next phase of a healthy people. 

Aaron Everitt is a husband and father from Colorado. He is a freelance writer who focuses on topics related to American government and culture. He writes for his Substack, Besides the Revolution, where a version of this essay first appeared, and was active in the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign as a volunteer.