Kennedy’s MAHA movement: Industry takes control

Children’s health report ignores gun violence, smoking and global warming, the greatest threats facing young people today.

The Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Health Again commission on children’s health reached its ignominious conclusion Tuesday by issuing a final report that failed to mention the biggest threats to childhood ill-health in the U.S.

The final 73-page report, which was accompanied by a 20-page strategy memo, made no mention of:

• Gun violence, the number one killer of American children under 18;

• Smoking, a lifelong habit most take up when teenagers; or

• Global warming, the greatest long-term threat facing the youngest generation.

Mentioning these issues would have required the report call attention to the biggest roadblocks standing in the way of addressing each of these issues. They are, respectively, the Gun Lobby, Big Tobacco and Big Oil & Gas.

Those industries are fervent supporters of the U.S.’s authoritarian headman, Donald Trump. His only consistent political position — one that he requires all his lackeys adhere to — is steadfast support for the nation’s richest and most powerful corporations and individuals, especially those that have given him huge campaign contributions.

Not a bad sentiment.

Even when it came to addressing the issues that Kennedy claims to care most about, his need to please Trump by giving special interests a pass denuded the final report of any meaningful measures. Those issues include the prevalence of ultra-processed food; chemical food additives; environmental toxins; and excessive use of psychotropic drugs and vaccines. Other than vaccines (last week, his denigration of vaccines led even a few Republican physician-Senators to question his honesty), those are issues that most Americans and unbiased researchers would also like to see addressed.

Yet the final report failed to outline any concrete steps that the Health and Human Services Department, the Agriculture Department or the Environmental Protection Agency plan to take. “A lot of this is nice (but) it’s a report about intentions, not about actions,” New York University professor of nutrition emeritus Marion Nestle told the PBS NewsHour. “How on earth are they going to do these things (when) the word regulation is only mentioned once?”

Regime actions contradict recommendations

Many of the deregulatory and budget cutting actions taken by the Trump regime since taking office work directly against the goals outlined in the report. For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency’s research department has been gutted, all but eliminating the agency’s ability to scientifically determine which environmental toxins are causing significant harm to children’s health.

The budget for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (colloquially food stamps) has been cut sharply, which will reduce food assistance to almost three million children. Rather than taking steps at the federal level to limit the ability of low-income beneficiaries to purchase sugar-laden beverages or salt-heavy snack foods (instead, they plan to offer technical assistance to states that want to do that), the Trump regime is making more children go hungry. Common sense suggests allowing three million kids to go hungry will destroy the health of far more children than allowing parents of kids on food stamps to continue buying soda pop.

The strategy report called on the Department of Education to “help states” reinstitute the presidential fitness test. The DoE is currently being dismantled by the Trump regime.

Also, it claimed HHS’ Administration for Children and Families will “promote greater physical activity” in after-school and summer programs. Meanwhile, Trump’s budget cutters slashed $7 billion to support those programs in June, only to restore a mere $1 billion a month later after widespread protests from educators in both Red and Blue states.

Perhaps the most curious oversight in yesterday’s strategy report was its turnaround on the chemicals, dyes and other additives in ultra-processed foods (UPFs), a major bête noire for Kennedy and a long-time concern of mainstream nutritionists. The main report’s 7-page section on UPFs contained 75 footnotes. Yet the strategy memo contained just a single action item of little significance: “USDA, HHS, and FDA will continue efforts to develop a U.S. government-wide definition for ‘Ultra-processed Food’ to support potential future research and policy activity.”

“What this says to me is that the first report was written by MAHA,” Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a former senior policy official for nutrition in the Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations, told Time Magazine. “The second one, the White House let industry lobbyists write it.”

Further reading:

“Kennedy commission child health report ignore gun violence, the leading cause of child death,” in the Los Angeles Times.

“Tobacco Use Among Children and Teens,” by the American Lung Association.

“It’s Not You, It’s the Food,” in the New York Times.

“You Might Have Already Fallen for MAHA’s Conspiracy Theories,” in the New York Times.