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The Turmoil Inside MAHA Is About More Than Just Vaccines
Disparate factions are sparring over some of RFK Jr.’s biggest priorities. A top FDA scientist is hired, ousted, then hired again.
WASHINGTON—Dr. Vinay Prasad seemed like a fitting choice by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become chief scientific officer of the Food and Drug Administration. He had criticized Covid vaccines and once called Dr. Anthony Fauci “a scientist cursed by narcissism.”
But Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement is a fractious and increasingly unwieldy coalition, and Prasad, as leader of the FDA’s vaccines and biologics division, quickly got sideways with one of its key factions.
“He gives too much blanket trust” to childhood vaccines, said Del Bigtree, a Kennedy ally and top aide to his 2024 presidential campaign.
Prasad’s past criticisms of some rare-disease treatments also alarmed biotech executives, and his agency’s approach to one company angered a MAHA supporter in the Senate. Soon White House officials were pushing for Prasad’s removal. On July 29, 84 days after Prasad took the job, he was out of it. Then, less than two weeks later, after Kennedy lobbied the White House, Prasad was back.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, then candidate Donald Trump and Kennedy harnessed the MAHA movement to powerful effect. Now, the coalition’s disparate factions are sparring over some of Kennedy’s biggest priorities—from vaccines to pharmaceutical regulation to pesticide use. And Kennedy’s effort to maintain the peace, according to several of his supporters, is turning out to be as difficult as herding cats.
The turmoil intensified last week when the White House announced it was firing Susan Monarez, confirmed by the Senate just weeks before, as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—which, like the FDA, is a division of Secretary Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services. This spring, Kennedy told supporters who worried Monarez wasn’t skeptical enough about vaccines that she was a “champion of MAHA values.” Recently, though, Monarez had declined to approve vaccine recommendations by a panel selected by Kennedy, according to Dr. Richard Besser, a former acting CDC director.
“If people are not aligned with the president’s vision and the secretary’s vision to make our country healthy again, then we will gladly show them the door,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday.
At times, though, Kennedy’s allies also have clashed with the White House itself, and with others in the MAGA movement who haven’t embraced all of Kennedy’s goals. That is putting the MAGA-MAHA alliance on unsteady ground.
“Despite all these policy wins, there is obviously visceral frustration still among many in the MAHA base,” said White House special employee and Kennedy adviser Calley Means at a Heritage Foundation event in August. “If this movement is going to stay alive, we have to show as voters that we support what is happening.”
A spokesman for HHS declined to comment, but pointed to an email Kennedy sent to the CDC staff saying he is committed to restoring transparency and credibility to the CDC.
Disparate followers
Kennedy has worked for years alongside many people in his movement. They include “medical freedom” activists who decry vaccine mandates and often question the science behind immunizations, especially Covid-19 shots. Others were drawn to Kennedy’s healthy food message, hoping he would move quickly to ban artificial dyes in food and to alter American diets. Still others supported his criticism of pesticides, microplastics and corporate power.
Now that he is part of the Trump administration, his supporters want results—and are saying so online. They have criticized him for not moving quickly to ban direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising and for not banning all injections that use messenger RNA technology. Some don’t like his declaration that his movement also aims to “make biotech great again.”
“Many of us disagree on the details,” said Tony Lyons, who helps run a political-action committee and a think tank that supports Kennedy, on a call this summer intended to unite activists. “We’re warriors, we’re activists, and we think for ourselves. We’re not good at being told what to do.”
Some MAHA supporters say Kennedy should have immediately banned Covid-19 shots that use messenger RNA technology. Some fault him for selling out to what they call corporate interests, including when he told Congress he would like to see all Americans use wearable gadgets to track their health.
Prasad became a target, too. MAHA supporters who wanted a full ban on messenger RNA products such as the Covid-19 vaccines weren’t happy with his limited approvals of them. Right-wing activist and Trump confidante Laura Loomer disparaged Prasad for his prior progressive politics and endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Before joining the White House, Prasad had criticized biotech company Sarepta Therapeutics, saying that his predecessor at the FDA had approved one of its treatments without enough evidence that it worked.
Weeks after Prasad became an FDA official, the agency waged what critics saw as an aggressive campaign against the company, pushing it to stop shipping its drug to boys with a rare, muscle-depleting disease.
The move unnerved some Republicans, including Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, one of Kennedy’s closest allies in Congress. During Trump’s first term, Johnson helped him pass a bill known as “right to try,” which allowed terminally ill patients access to not-yet-proven therapies. Johnson texted Trump to alert him to Prasad’s shipping halt on the Sarepta drug.
Kennedy personally vouched for Prasad, telling Trump that he needed him, according to people familiar with the matter. But that didn’t dissuade the White House officials pushing for his removal. Prasad resigned under pressure.
At that point, internecine battles at HHS had already claimed Kennedy’s chief of staff, Heather Flick, and his top policy aide, Hannah Anderson. After being ousted by Kennedy, Anderson was so upset she accidentally backed her car into Kennedy’s vehicle, people familiar with the matter said.
Wavering support
The tensions go beyond vaccines and the internal workings of HHS. Some activists who supported Kennedy’s presidential campaign and then persuaded skeptics of Trump to back the Republican ticket after Kennedy dropped out, are now beginning to waver over the administration’s handling of pesticides and so-called forever chemicals.
Kennedy had pledged to tackle pesticides used by farmers, especially the herbicide glyphosate, commonly known as Roundup. As an environmental lawyer in 2018, he had helped win a landmark judgment against Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, for a client who said Roundup caused his cancer.
Earlier this year, White House officials told Kennedy to stop talking about glyphosate, people familiar with the matter said. Since then, he has been mostly silent on the issue even as House Republicans proposed a provision that his allies say would essentially shield the pesticide’s maker from lawsuits. The Supreme Court has asked the administration’s solicitor general to weigh in on Bayer’s bid to help resolve the glyphosate litigation that has already cost it billions of dollars.
“This is not the direction we wanted to go in,” said Zen Honeycutt, who recently signed a MAHA letter addressed to Trump. The letter, which claimed that Trump isn’t fulfilling his pledge to stand up for people who worry about pesticides in food, also was signed by top aides to Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
“Mr. President, creating broad liability protections for pesticides is a losing issue for your party and your coalition, and may well cost you the House majority in the midterms,” the letter said.
A much-anticipated MAHA action plan isn’t expected to include new restrictions on pesticides, despite calls from activists and Kennedy’s own campaign promises, according to a draft reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. That would be a win for agriculture groups that backed Trump’s campaign.
Trump’s EPA also rolled back parts of the national drinking-water standards implemented during the Biden administration, and it extended the deadlines set by Democrats to comply with new limits on the use of PFAS, the forever chemicals said to contaminate groundwater.
“There’s some tension there between the activists who want to take this opportunity to accelerate positive change and people who are like ‘Whoa, we gotta keep our heads down,’” said Charles Eisenstein, an author and activist who was a senior adviser to Kennedy last year.
Whether Kennedy can unite his supporters will be tested this fall when he unveils the final version of the MAHA strategy, new dietary guidelines and preliminary findings from his search for a cause of autism.
The FDA’s Prasad will be there to implement that agency’s piece of it.
Kennedy and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary successfully lobbied White House chief of staff Susie Wiles for his reinstatement, people familiar with the matter said. They argued that Prasad was needed to enact Kennedy’s vision and that the administration shouldn’t let online brushfires, especially those started by Loomer, take out key appointments.
It isn’t clear, though, how much time he’ll spend at the FDA’s White Oak, Maryland, headquarters. When he was ousted at the end of July, he said he didn’t want to be a distraction and that the commute to the FDA from his home in California had been too much.
Prasad had been spending roughly three days out of every two weeks at the Maryland headquarters, documents reviewed by the Journal indicate, despite the administration’s efforts to return federal workers to the office. The agency had been footing the bill for his cross-country commute, the documents show. Prasad didn’t respond to requests for comment, and HHS declined to comment on his commute.
Upon his return to the agency, Prasad told his staff in an email: “There have been a lot of changes at FDA in recent months. By now you see that I too know viscerally and personally what uncertainty feels like.”
Write to Liz Essley Whyte at liz.whyte@wsj.com and Natalie Andrews at natalie.andrews@wsj.com
