Beyond the antivaxx stuff, MAHA is either banal or fake
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Excerpts from Matt Yglesia’s substack.
Kennedy, in a way that I find completely perverse, has received credit that he doesn’t even remotely deserve for making the banal observation that lifestyle determinants of health are probably a bigger deal than official medical care.
This has been retconned by people experiencing a weird conjunction of credulousness and paranoia as some kind of deep, dark, forbidden truth about America that “they” don’t want you to know.
In truth, the Clinton administration promulgated “a comprehensive plan to promote physical activity and decrease obesity in the nation's young people.” George W. Bush announced a “HealthierUS initiative designed to help Americans, especially children, live longer, better, and healthier lives.” Michelle Obama had “Let’s Move” and an initiative to improve childhood nutrition. The Biden administration just last year promulgated new school nutrition guidelines offering less sugar and more “protein-rich breakfast foods such as yogurt, tofu, eggs, nuts, and seeds.”
The idea that, conceptually, it would be good for Americans in general and children in particular to exercise more and eat less junk food is genuinely the least controversial idea in American politics. It’s driving me insane to see banal, vaguely lib-coded platitudes about health care and public health now be coded as daring red pill insights that we need to give credit to a crank for articulating.
This is especially true because the whole difficulty here isn’t that it’s brave to say that people should eat healthier and work out more. It’s hard to actually get people to do that. The same country that doesn’t want to make Covid vaccines mandatory also isn’t going to want to ban packaged snacks and sodas. You could obtain giant public health gains by raising the alcohol tax, but people don’t want to pay higher taxes.
The only actual intersection between any of RFK’s stated views and anything acceptable to a business-friendly anti-regulatory Republican Party is discouraging vaccination. Of course, like any human being, Kennedy has some ideas that are correct. But those ideas are either banal or unrelated to his actual authority in office. What he is doing as HHS chief is sowing doubt about longstanding vaccination programs.
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