America needs a real challenger to corporate greed, not conspiracy-riddled RFK Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drew modest support from Republicans and Democrats by running for president on a campaign to “Make America Healthy Again, (MAHA), reducing chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease by targeting corporate influence over food regulation and nutrition standards. On their face, these are important goals. However, Kennedy is not the right leader to take them on — even if incoming President Trump gives him the chance.
The danger of the MAHA movement is that it mixes real villains with false ones. So long as political leaders in both parties fail to meaningfully speak to the ways powerful corporations make us sicker, conspiracy-minded figures like Kennedy will be able to fill the void. Rather than chide Kennedy supporters, Democrats should drill down to the root sources of their fears, and fight for real corporate accountability.
There’s no shortage of reporting debunking Kennedy’s more dangerous theories, but it bears repeating: no reputable scientific body has found a link between childhood vaccines and autism, nor evidence that 5G cell towers cause harm to human cells, nor that ivermectin can treat COVID-19.
Kennedy’s broader argument emphasizes that people would not need as many medications (including vaccines) with better diets and fewer pollutants in the environment. While no one would question the benefits of a healthy diet and less pollution, these factors cannot provide the same disease immunity and treatment for acute illness as pharmaceutical products.
Despite his falsehoods, RFK Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again platform has gained modest yet meaningful bipartisan appeal. Kennedy won support from 7-15 precent of the electorate over the course of his campaign, consisting largely of self-identified independents under 50 years old who were less likely to follow politics.
Food and health-related conspiracy theories are nothing new. Studies suggest that some people cling to conspiracies to make sense of perceived threats to their needs and to control the anxiety of feeling powerless. At the heart of most compelling conspiracies is a grain of powerful truth that appeals to people’s intuition about how the world “really” works. A common thread in most wellness misinformation is the specter of Big Food or Big Pharma putting profits ahead of public health. On this point, Kennedy and the MAHA movement are not wrong.
As a reporter who covers corporate influence over the food system, I know all too well that our environment is full of real threats. Chemical companies have been allowed to put Teflon and similar forever chemicals linked with cancers and fertility issues into our cookware and food containers. The U.S. permits farmers to use pesticides linked to Parkinson’s and hormonal disruption that are banned in China and the European Union. Excessive synthetic fertilizers and manure from concentrated animal feeding operations are polluting rural drinking water with nitrates, whose consumption is linked to cancers, thyroid disease and “blue baby” syndrome.
From a nutrition standpoint, dominant food corporations have flooded our markets with unhealthy, highly processed products with little to no limit. Consuming ultra-processed foods has been linked to an increased risk of heart disease, type II diabetes, obesity, overeating and colorectal cancer. These products are ubiquitous in the U.S. and make up nearly 60 percent of adult diets and almost 70 percent of children’s.
Big Food corporations fund nutrition research to cast doubt on their products’ poor health impacts. Big Food also directly staffs or heavily influences the federal agencies that are supposed to hold them accountable. U.S. Right to Know revealed that nine out of 20 members of the current Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations to update official government dietary guidelines, had conflicts of interest with food and pharmaceutical corporations or trade groups. In years past, an even larger portion of these committee members had industry ties.
Corporate influence is not isolated to nutrition policy. There is a documented revolving door between EPA pesticide regulators and the pesticide industry as well as USDA and meatpacking companies or trade associations. With such close ties between regulators and industry, it is no wonder that Kennedy’s criticism of corruption resonates.
However, no matter what RFK Jr. says, he decided to lend his support to a candidate unquestionably committed to rolling back health and environmental regulations. It’s highly unlikely that Donald Trump, who famously signed an executive order drafted by Tyson Foods, will let Kennedy impose new regulations on food additives or agrichemicals (though I would love to be proven wrong).
Even if Kennedy can implement some of his reformist policies, the public health could still suffer on net as he platforms and enables vaccine avoidance. We need more policy leaders who are genuinely committed to challenging corporate power without harmful quackery. As the Democratic Party soul searches for post-election lessons, it should respond to growing conspiratorial and anti-institutional fervor by challenging the real forces driving it: that is, corporate greed putting profits ahead of public health.
Claire Kelloway is program manager for Food and Agriculture Systems at the Open Markets Institute.