President Donald Trump’s new Make America Healthy Again commission, established through an executive order signed Feb. 13, released its first report on Thursday, titled “Make Our Children Healthy Again: Assessment.” Trump held an event at the White House on Thursday afternoon to discuss the report with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The 68-page report is a mix of perfectly reasonable observations about the availability of nutritious foods and the influence of giant food companies, along with hints at more fringe theories for the cause of sickness in America.
“The health of American children is in crisis,” reads a copy of the new report obtained by Axios. The report had not been published by the White House yet at the time of this writing.
“Despite outspending peer nations by more than double per capita on healthcare,” the report continues, “the United States ranks last in life expectancy among high–income countries and suffers higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.”
The report lays the blame for the poor health of American kids on four broad categories: poor diet, lack of physical activity and chronic stress, “overmedicalization,” and the “aggregation of environmental chemicals.” The report also blames technology and tries several times to suggest that vaccines are making children ill without explicitly saying what anti-vaccine advocates have falsely claimed for years: that vaccines cause autism.
President Trump has repeatedly hinted at his own belief that vaccines cause autism, something that is not supported by years of research. And yet, Trump emphasized his concern about autism on Thursday, saying that statistics around the “alarming” rise of autism was the part of the report that “gets” him the most.
“Just a few decades ago, one in 10,000 children had autism. Today it’s one in 31,” Trump said at the event Thursday. “Last time I heard the number is one in 34, right? Now it’s one in 31. There’s something wrong and we will not stop until we defeat the chronic disease epidemic in America.”
The new MAHA report points to the lack of vaccine requirements in many European countries while trying to suggest that it’s the reason Europeans live longer than Americans. But it ignores the fact that Europe is currently experiencing a historic measles outbreak and the benefits of universal health care coverage, something every wealthy country in Europe has achieved, either through government-run healthcare systems like the UK and Norway or through hybrid public-private systems like Germany and France.
“Today’s children are the sickest generation in American history in terms of chronic disease and these preventable trends continue to worsen each year, posing a threat to our nation’s health, economy, and military readiness,” the report claims, repeating a line that Secretary Kennedy has used before about needs from the Defense Department.
The report questioned the heavy use of pesticides like glyphosate, which is found in Monsanto’s Roundup, as well as atrazine. The report also raises concerns about microplastics and flouride, as well as an unproven idea linking cellphone and wifi radiation to low sperm counts.
The MAHA commission sat at a table for the White House event on Thursday, comprised of pro-Trump extremists, including Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine advocate, as well as FDA commissioner Marty Makary, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and OMB Director Russ Vought. Other members of the commission include Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, and Stephen Miller, the far-right Trump advisor best known for shouting during TV interviews and threatening to suspend habeas corpus. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Medicare and Medicaid, was also present and spoke at the event about his efforts to lower drug prices.
“Just tremendous talent around this table, the most respected people,” said Trump of the MAHA commission during the event, which was livestreamed online but wasn’t picked up live by any of the major cable TV networks.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins is also on the MAHA commission, which is curious given the fact that she stripped roughly $1 billion of funding from the USDA that used to allow local farmers to deliver food to food banks and schools. Rollins is perhaps more responsible than anyone in the current regime for taking food out of the mouths of hungry kids and yet is seen as an expert on how to make America’s children more healthy.
The commission met just once behind closed doors, according to STAT News, before the White House event on Thursday. Last-minute changes were made to the report at the behest of the White House, according to the Wall Street Journal, including some cuts to references to corporate lobbying about so-called forever chemicals. The EPA under Zeldin will soon weaken rules intended to keep forever chemicals out of water, as the Washington Post recently reported, though it’s not clear whether that decision has anything to do with that section getting nixed from the report. The White House also reportedly added some recognition that childhood vaccines can protect kids from infectious disease, according to the Journal, perhaps blunting some of the anti-vaccine messaging that may have been present in earlier drafts.
The U.S. is indeed struggling with poor health outcomes. It has lower life expectancy compared to other wealthy nations. And it spends more than any other country for those poor outcomes, according to JAMA. None of that is contested. But the MAHA movement dabbles in enough anti-scientific thinking and seems to get tunnel-vision when it comes to the ways in which Americans can get healthier. Kennedy has repeatedly said that MAHA has a strong spiritual component, something echoed in a 2024 podcast by Casey Means, the new nominee to be Surgeon General. Means does not have an active medical license and dropped out of her residency program.
The MAHA commission is scheduled to release another report in August to lay out a policy strategy that’s supposed to fix the country’s health problems. That planned report is roughly in line with Secretary Kennedy’s promise to reveal the “cause” of autism by the fall, something he asserted at the White House in April. Needless to say, announcing you’ll find a cause for a specific ailment in a particular timeframe isn’t how science works.
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