I’m trying to avoid too much topical posting about MAHA for a couple of reasons. First and primarily, because of the other piece I have in development that works out many of the same arguments that I am going to present here and more, at much greater length; I want to be wary of cannibalizing that piece too much because it is, I think, thoughtful and coherent. Second, I try to avoid it because it feels just so bad to do. I spent some time on Friday going back through old screen shots from 2021-2022, when I was extremely online, fighting constantly with the so-called “Covid contrarians” that are now empowered to decide whether and when you can vaccinate your own child. I really couldn’t believe the frequency and enthusiasm with which I used to screen shot things that made me nauseous, panicked, or want to cry. (The brackish swirl of sewer effluvium that would eventually precipitate Moms for Liberty out chased me off of Twitter a few times in 2020, to say nothing of the multiple times I’ve been “canceled.”) The pace at which you must constantly be filtering toxic slop through your mind like a Baltimore Harbor oyster, in order to catabolize “events” and anabolize them as a coherent and timely take, is not sustainable or even survivable, and it’s not supposed to be – I’ve never been more demoralized in my life than when I was doing it regularly. But I don’t know when the other piece will be out, and events are upsetting enough to overcome my resistance, and here I go, Speaking My Truth.

The latest head-clutcher is last week’s disastrous ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) meeting, featuring Tracy Beth Høeg in her new role as head of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the FDA. Astute or frequent readers will note that this office is in charge of regulating, among other things, several of the the currently unapproved “orthobiologics” that Høeg offers as part of her sports medicine practice, including both “autologous” treatments like platelet-rich plasma or bone marrow aspirate injections, more ambiguous from a regulatory perspective, and straightforwardly sham “proliferative therapy” or “prolotherapy,” like dextrose – sugar – injections. Tracy Beth’s appointment reflects the shallowness of the MAHA bench – every group chat has got the halfhearted podcaster, disheveled creep, and orthorexic almond mom – but any comfort in that was quickly crushed by the embarrassing spectacle of the ACIP meeting itself. The committee ultimately voted to modify hepatitis B vaccination guidelines for newborns, ending a longstanding guideline for universal vaccination at birth that, since its introduction in 1991, has been credited with reducing cases of hepatitis B in children by 99%. Who knows what, if anything, these people actually believe. What’s certain is that they are benefitting from their positions in ways that, while perhaps not yet completely clear yet, are extremely sus.

By all accounts, the MAHA people on and off ACIP are what MAHA believers at the popular level are actually afraid of: unaccountable bureaucrats with shady conflicts of interest, consigning your children to sickness and death with the stroke of a pen because it enriches them, or at the very least makes it slightly easier for them to dispense plasma injections (at up to $2000 a pop) to long-distance runners. Most of the reactions to the meeting have recognized these folks as incredibly bad actors. Director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota Dr. Michael Osterholm tweeted, following the ACIP vote, that the federal government “can no longer be trusted” on vaccines. (I think this one is a bad idea, the few people in America who actually think that MAHA rocks already think that the federal government can’t be trusted on vaccines, and I guarantee they do not understand that their champions now are the federal health authorities. I wish it were otherwise but Americans just are that stupid and ignorant.) Senator Bill Cassidy – MD, professional clown, and key vote for RFK Jr.’s confirmation – pulled an Urkel and urged that the acting CDC director decline to ratify the vote, which is unlikely given that the acting CDC director is seasteading longevity creep, “health investor,” and RFK Jr. adjutant Jim O’Neill. Various professional associations of physicians are issuing statements promising to ignore the guidelines and do their best to offer the vaccines as usual. These reactions are all bouncing off of a big dark object, echolocating the shape of an institutional long game that has not been explicitly elaborated: it will have served MAHA’s agenda well if they can succeed in making the federal health authorities irrelevant. Creating precedent to ignore guidelines undermines their authority, including the regulatory authority that is the MAHA movement’s real target. Disturb that authority by an inch on universal vaccination, and, they’re gambling, they can dislodge it by a foot for regulations governing – just as one example here – federal reimbursement of “orthobiologics.” 

The rank corruption and tragic loser aesthetics of the MAHA leadership are, unfortunately for all of us, connected to a segment of the public via an umbilical cord of unconscious anxieties and resentments. I’ve already explored how MAHA is marketing, as I will do at greater length in the  aforementioned piece under development. In that piece I devote a fair amount of space to the Beavis and Butthead of the MAHA movement, the Means siblings Casey and Calley. Casey is a med school dropout turned quack who Trump nominated for Surgeon General; twin brother Calley is an entrepreneur who we have to thank for introducing Trump to RFK Jr. Casey has a company called Levels, which sells wearable devices like glucose monitors; Calley’s company, called TrueMed, is a platform for spending HSA and FSA dollars on wearables and alternative therapies. The sound of one hand (EFT) tapping. Months ago, I went to Calley Means’s blog for my other piece with every intention to ridicule it in microscopic detail, but what I found was even more disquieting than the fauvist third-grader style that Calley writes in: the Means’s wellness origin story begins with the untimely and tragic death of their mother from pancreatic cancer. The Means siblings are entrepreneurs, and effective marketing is meaning-making. They may be ruthlessly monetizing their anguish over their mother’s death, but that doesn’t diminish the anguish – the scope and reality of it is what makes for good advertising. 

The MAHA movement, like a parasite siphoning blood to itself, draws power from the search for meaning in and especially control and autonomy over personal health and wellness, things that our system of social organization conspires at every turn to deny. (The micro-industry of parasite influencers within the wellness community – everything, from IBS to psychosis, is actually parasites! – is worth a dedicated future exploration.) The vaccine paranoia, especially, taps into a long-standing tension between this complex social organization and individual freedom and autonomy. (Recall that Ted Kaczynski signed his manifesto “FC,” for “Freedom Club.”) I use a lot of Wilhelm Reich’s insights and concepts in thinking about MAHA and here’s one: MAHA works as marketing by offering psychological resolution to painful and apparently insuperable material contradictions. Here’s another one: his concept of the “average personality structure.” What is something common to most Americans? We’re accustomed to being hosed by actors legitimate and illegitimate in almost every aspect of our lives – we pay eye-watering bills for routine medical care, we can’t afford rent or basic car repairs, and we love joining MLMs and pyramid schemes. If there’s such a thing as a deep-seated desire to be scammed, it mostly manifests at the behavioral level as a desire, latent or overt, for other people to eat shit, at least as much shit as it feels like we’re eating. At least, if other people are eating shit, one can feel in on the scam. I would be so bold as to venture that the experience of scamming and being scammed offers something psychologically satisfying within American culture, regardless of personal characteristics or belief orientation. For the libertarian-leaners really anxious about their freedom, there’s MAHA. For the liberal-progressives, there are things like Michael Hoerger and the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative, peddling a different flavor of sorta-scientific conspiracy. Hoerger is much less charismatic and much less effective than the Del Bigtrees and the Andrew Wakefields of the world, and I mean only to point out that he fills a niche in the scam marketplace – this is the point. The average personality structure of our time and place, underneath all the content and signifiers of political ideology, responds to the psychological manipulations of scamming, which is basically to say, of advertising. 

As I have said before and I’m sure will say again, MAHA is marketing, not disinformation. And the uniting feature of the Whole Sick Crew here is that they are scammers and opportunists. Vinay Prasad is an irksome nerd who edits his own Wikipedia page to praise his own high school performance. Martin Kulldorff flopped upward as only Gen X’ers have ever been able to do, surfing his one notable accomplishment (a really mid piece of statistical software for geographic cluster detection) to a Harvard faculty position and on to the sweaty embrace of the right wing welfare dole. Tracy Beth Høeg is just a girlie who wants to long distance run and wear ugly skirts. They are incompetent, unlikable freaks; they serve (not cunt, but in government) at the pleasure of RFK Jr. but don’t have even a fraction of his rizz. I think that communications efforts from the scattered and ragged detachments of the legitimate scientific community should focus on disarticulating them from him. At least RFK Jr. has (if not personal integrity, principles, empathy, or really any detectable human qualities besides a raging Zyn addiction) the consistency of the lifelong quack who really believes the shit he’s saying. These other people do not. They sensed an opportunity to amass power and wealth for themselves, and they’re seizing that opportunity via straightforward corruption and via gambling with your children’s health. The shadowy right wing money networks they’re embedded in (which Justin Feldman and I identified and wrote about all the way back in 2020) helped golden-parachute them out of the legitimate medical establishment that produced them and that they failed to build sustainable or satisfying careers in. I keep insisting that their time is short as they trip all over themselves and each other, learning on the fly that running the country is a good deal harder than shitposting. They are not all-powerful, they are losers with powerful backers, and all things must pass. 

Looking back through those old screen shots, I had a lot from people, many of whom worked at UCSF, who are still trundling away at stable if insipid careers as respectable academics. It’s irritating that these folks ran so much cover for Vinay Prasad especially, and that they did it because Vinay Prasad was making the arguments that they liked best about school reopening or whatever else. They were so trusting of “data” and so convinced that the data would support their positions that they would (and did) support anybody who mustered “data” to argue their point of view. The Whole Sick Crew have of course thanked these academics for their loyalty by lancing their research programs and ridiculing them on X, the Everything App. This, and not wokeness or whatever, is where a very real danger of ideology in science lies. These folks were buried so deep in the Traschan of Ideology that they let themselves be bamboozled – one might say scammed – lulled by the belief that anybody saying what you want to hear with data is making a good-faith argument about evidence and not, say, part of a coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy teachers’ unions or the entire edifice of American research science. The time for this kind of guilelessness is over. If we want to be taken seriously, let alone maintain any level of basic respect for ourselves and our work, we can’t readmit these people into the mainstream when their benefactor(s) are out of power. Once you’ve crossed into the griftersphere, you can’t come back.