How America went MAHA
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went before the Senate finance committee Wednesday to make his case that he should be confirmed as President Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to pursue his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
Democrats focused their criticism on Kennedy’s long-standing vaccine skepticism. The former environmental lawyer has spent decades spreading pseudo-science and lies about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and their debunked links to autism. His calls to reevaluate our vaccine use remain broadly unpopular, even as the recent drop-off in child vaccinations worries doctors and public health experts.
Kennedy wanted to focus on topics that are much less divisive: America’s chronic disease epidemic and the unhealthy food that is widely available and consumed in this country.
“We will scrutinize the chemical additives in our food supply. We will remove financial conflicts from our agencies … We will reverse the chronic disease epidemic, and put the nation back on the road to good health,” he said in his opening statement.
One of Kennedy’s most important advisers and allies in that fight was in the hearing room.
Calley Means is a former lobbyist for food and pharmaceutical companies who is now a health-startup entrepreneur and healthy-food evangelist. Along with his sister Casey Means, he wrote the bestseller Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. He supported Kennedy’s third party bid for the presidency, and then helped connect Kennedy with Donald Trump.
“Bobby Kennedy has not lowered or weakened faith in our public health authorities. The public health authorities have done that,” Means told Today, Explained cohost Noel King. “The insane thing to do would be to continue the current path. The smart thing to do would be to give someone a chance who’s talking about shifting the paradigm of our health focus to preventing and reversing chronic disease.”
Means talked to Noel about how he became a healthy-food crusader, why he thinks Kennedy’s agenda as HHS secretary would be broadly popular, and why he thinks we should all be more skeptical of how America administers vaccines. Below is a transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity. Make sure to listen to the whole episode.
Noel King
You’re in a very unique position because you didn’t entirely witness this as a civilian. You say you were, in fact, also a lobbyist for food and pharma. Can I ask what you saw as a lobbyist that has brought you to this place?
Calley Means
In hindsight, what I saw is that the health care system is working to propagate a system where more Americans are sick and to perform interventions on those Americans — not to cure any disease but manage it. That’s 95 percent of our medical spending. 95 percent of our medical spending is management of chronic disease.
Why is Coca-Cola funding the American Diabetes Association? And why would the American Diabetes Association be accepting money from Coca-Cola when we have a diabetes crisis among children, when it’s liquid diabetes, it’s high-sugar drinks? So there’s actually this interplay between our food system, our ultra-processed food system that’s getting people addicted, that’s getting people sick, and then a health care system that stands silent. That’s on the food side.
On the pharmaceutical side, it’s the rigging of institutions. The pharmaceutical industry is the lifeblood of academic research. And the NIH and the federal bureaucracies are a revolving door, an orgy of corruption between industry and government. I mean, 11 of the 12 past FDA directors literally left the FDA and the next day walked into a pharmaceutical office. I had a list of Stanford and Harvard professors that we were going to funnel money to. It’s rank corruption. And I saw that.
Noel King
Calley, what do you hear as the main pushback against you? What do your critics argue?
Calley Means
Well, they resort to ad hominem attacks. If you really stay on these unimpeachable messages, I think they’re pretty hard to disagree with.
It’s a demonstrable fact that our scientific and health care agencies are co-opted. 75 percent of the FDA department that oversees drug approvals is funded by the pharmaceutical industry itself. NIH bureaucrats are able to take royalties from drugs, which they did during Covid. It’s also impossible to argue with the fact that we’re the sickest country in the developed world and there’s a true chronic disease crisis among children that’s pretty hard to argue with.
The health care industry is the largest and fastest growing industry in the country. It’s the most powerful industry in the country. The pharmaceutical industry is the biggest funder of politicians themselves, scientific research, regulatory agencies, the media itself. So they control a lot of our institutions just by definition.
Noel King
There’s a claim that there’s almost a conspiracy at play here that involves big food companies, pharmaceutical companies, medical schools. It goes all the way to the top levels of government. I wonder if you can explain that aspect of your message. Why? Because many people will be turned off by what they view as conspiratorial thinking. Someone might say it sounds a bit nutty.
Calley Means
What sounds nutty about what I said?
Noel King
That idea that everyone is in league to make people sick.
Calley Means
I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that. I completely dispute the premise of your question.
I said that the pharmaceutical industry makes money when people are sick and loses money when they’re healthy. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s a demonstrable statement of economic fact. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s a statement of fact. Hospitals make money from fee-for-service health care. Many friends from Harvard Business School of mine work at hospitals, and their job is dependent on filling the beds. That’s not a conspiracy.
Noel King
I’m going to push just a little bit further on this, Calley. Because there are statements of fact that you are making, and they will pass a fact check. But it’s this idea that pharmaceutical companies want to keep us sick, that food companies want to keep us sick.
Calley Means
I didn’t say that. I said there are economic incentives for people to be sick.
Noel King
Well, the economic incentive is the want. I mean, it’s America, it’s a capitalist society.
Calley Means
No, I didn’t. I didn’t talk about their motivations.
Noel King
What are their motivations?
Calley Means
This is the largest industry in the country’s health care. A pharmaceutical executive gets fired if there’s no growth. Growth of the pharmaceutical industry presupposes and necessitates more sick people.
Noel King
You’re saying there is an economic incentive.
Calley Means
Somebody gets fired unless the company grows, the company requires more sick patients to grow. That’s an indisputable fact.
Noel King
I think that many people would agree with you that when there is money involved, the incentives to grow can lead to perverse outcomes like a lot of sick Americans. You are the founder of a company that sells, among other things, supplements, fitness classes, fitness equipment … You personally have an economic incentive in this, too. And I wonder, is there any part of you that thinks maybe I should just be the guy that says the thing but not try to make money off it?
Calley Means
Well, that’s inaccurate. My company facilitates third party medical interventions to recommend whether exercise, supplementation, food in some cases is a medically appropriate intervention.
Noel King
And you’re not making any profit?
Calley Means
I don’t think we should expect nobody to make money. I think everyone’s financial conflicts should be highly exposed. My company makes money when a third party provider recommends efficacious treatments of root cause non-pharmaceutical interventions. My company will make money when more people are exercising and more people are eating broccoli. I am absolutely fine with that being exposed.
Noel King
President Trump appointed a seed oil lobbyist to be chief of staff of the USDA. He fought Obama-era rules to cut ultra-processed foods from school lunch. He made RFK [Jr.] eat a Big Mac for a photo op. In the 2024 election, President Trump overwhelmingly won in America’s farm-dependent counties. Those are areas where there is a lot of farming. And so you would assume the president has to really take care not to alienate Big Agriculture. Do you think President Trump really is genuinely invested in the MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] movement?
Calley Means
Well, he didn’t have to appoint Bobby Kennedy. He didn’t have to say at every single rally that he was going to have Bobby Kennedy go wild on health. So President Trump said this: He doesn’t think a lot about health policy, but what he does think a lot about is corruption and taking on the swamp and taking on corporate cronyism. I think he’s really seen in Bobby Kennedy how the forces that profit from sick children are a great example of corruption holding us down.
Noel King
There is an area here that is deeply divisive and it will come up again and again. Mr. Kennedy has said before that he believes autism comes from vaccines. He runs a nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, that consistently casts doubt on vaccines, on the schedule in which they are administered and the ingredients in them, and on whether they protect or actually cause chronic illnesses. Do Mr. Kennedy’s positions on vaccines concern you at all?
Calley Means
Well, what Bobby Kennedy has consistently said about vaccines during the campaign is that they should be studied like any other pharmaceutical product. Blanket trust of pharmaceutical companies is not a good idea either. I don’t think anyone disagrees with continued scientific research on interventions we’re providing to the American people, whether that be pharmaceuticals or the other 4.6 billion prescriptions we’re writing in America a year.
And even what you mentioned about the Children’s Health Defense, you didn’t say that they’re attacking all vaccines in general. You said they’re questioning the pharmaceutical schedule. They’re questioning specific ingredients. We should be scrutinizing each formulation. That’s a good thing to do.
Noel King
Our parents are old enough to remember polio. We’re in the millennial generation and polio feels like it was a million years ago. It really wasn’t. Americans broadly are susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. Let me offer you the concern as I’ve heard it articulated: Americans are going to decide they don’t trust vaccines broadly. They are not going to vaccinate their children. And that will return us to a generation and a time that most people just don’t want to go back to.
Calley Means
I think you just painted an extremely pessimistic and nihilistic view of the American people. What an unfounded statement to say that they’re prone to conspiracy thinking. That’s kind of a dismissive statement.
Noel King
I myself am prone to it.
Calley Means
Well, maybe that’s being rational. Maybe that’s being prone to questioning things. This is what President Trump and Bobby talked about during the campaign. I strongly believe the American people are rational. The American people don’t want their kids to be sick. I really commend and respect the media hearkening back and their concern for polio and polio coming back. But I would push you if you or anyone else is concerned about childhood health, which is the real issue here. We should be concerned about what’s happening right now. We have a chronic disease crisis. We have a truly societally destabilizing event happening. Yes, I agree. We should keep polio at bay. But that’s not even on the top 10 list.
Noel King
Fair enough. Let me ask you one last question. If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement, is very close to being inside the system, maybe even in a couple of years it will be the system. Some people might say, “Well, that’s when the work gets really hard, right?” It’s easier to be an outsider than it is to be an insider. Do you have any thoughts on what it might be like for this outsider movement to operate on the inside? Do you think it’ll be tough?
Calley Means
Bobby a reform-minded person — I would say a magnetic, incredible leader — and he is putting a stake in the ground that we need to move to a more preventative model and a more chronic disease reversal focused model of health. That’s his stake.
I had a really profound conversation with the dean of a medical school recently, and he was honest. He said, listen, everyone in the faculty lounge thinks Bobby is a whack job. If you steer NIH funding to more preventative outcomes, they’re going to kick and scream and complain and say that’s stupid, but they’re going to write grants for what the NIH is saying they want. If you can win and keep this vibe and this movement toward that more preventative pull in four years and six years, Bobby will be gone, but if we keep heading in that preventative direction, in six years, it’ll be the norm. In six years it won’t be about Bobby being crazy. It will just be how things are done.
That’s the stakes right now. We’ve lost our way a bit. Our health incentives are too focused on waiting for people to get sick and then managing those conditions and, I would argue, profiting from those conditions. What we’re trying to do is get conflicts of interest out of the system and steer the sizable incentives that the government creates toward a more preventative future that asks, “How can we actually prevent and reverse these diseases?”
That’s the fight right now. And we just have to continue to win that argument. It’s not going to be total shock and awe. We’re not going to be able to change everything at once. But we really have changed the country.