It’s been a year since Kennedy and Trump joined forces. Here are MAHA’s top 3 wins.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted in August 2024 that a major factor behind his decision to endorse President Donald Trump was the opportunity to help “Make America Healthy Again” in a future Trump administration.

“Don’t you want healthy children?” Kennedy said in a speech. “And don’t you want the chemicals out of our food? And don’t you want the regulatory agencies to be free from corporate corruption? And that’s what President Trump told me that he wanted.”

Since his hotly contested confirmation as Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary in February, Kennedy has worked ardently to deliver on the promise of MAHA.

Already, HHS under his tutelage has secured numerous victories on the health front, including the:

• cancellation of mRNA vaccine development contracts;
• elimination of the Biden-era vaccine-reporting requirement and corresponding incentive system for hospitals;
• termination of thousands of bureaucrats along with senior establishmentarians such as Christine Grady, the wife of former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci;
• removal of retarding fluoride drug products for children from the market;
• requirement that Pfizer and Moderna add new safety warnings to their COVID-19 vaccines; and
• removal of the COVID vaccine from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended vaccine schedule for healthy pregnant women and children.

Although the Trump administration has delivered many MAHA wins, three in particular stand out as particularly consequential.

Fresh start at the ACIP

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is the federal panel whose vaccine recommendations become official policy at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and apply to the entire American population once adopted by the agency’s director — a position which, at the time of writing, was vacant thanks to Susan Monarez’s firing on Wednesday.

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Photographer: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Kennedy fired all 17 members of the ACIP in June.

While every member of the ACIP was a Biden administration appointee, the health secretary’s principle concern was not the panelists’ politics but rather their cozy relationships with some of the organizations they were tasked with scrutinizing.

For instance, data provided on OpenPaymentData.CMS.gov, a site managed by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, indicated that Edwin Jose Asturias, one of the ACIP members whom Kennedy fired, collected around $54,000 from pharmaceutical companies, including $20,705 in what appear to be consulting fees.

Blaze News previously reported that among the companies that paid Asturias what appear to have been consulting fees were Pfizer and Merck Sharpe & Dohme LLC, a bio-pharmaceutical subsidiary of the company whose pneumococcal vaccine Capvaxive the committee voted to recommend in October. Asturias also apparently netted millions in research support from Big Pharma, including over $3.1 million from Pfizer and over $730,000 from the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline LLC.

Like Asturias, Kennedy noted “most of ACIP’s members have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines.”

Kennedy indicated that the individuals he appointed to the newly cleared panel were “highly credentialed physicians and scientists who will make extremely consequential public health determinations by applying evidence-based decision-making with objectivity and common sense” and had “each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.”

Nuking gender ideology

Pursuant to President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14168, the HHS has taken a wrecking ball to gender ideology.

For starters, the department released guidance to the U.S. government, to the public, and to external partners that sex is an immutable biological classification and that there are only two sexes, male and female.

The department has applied this standard to civil rights enforcement, health care policy, and sports eligibility; launched federal civil rights investigations into whether various states violated Title IX by allowing men in women’s sports; canceled funding for related programs and activities; and scrubbed its websites of messaging, guidance, and language that advanced gender ideology.

The HHS has also conditioned federal funding for states’ Personal Responsibility Education Program grants on the removal of all references to gender ideology.

California learned the hard way and had its PREP grant terminated on Aug. 21. The HHS’ Administration for Children and Families noted in a release that the agency would not tolerate funding “curricula that could encourage kids to contemplate mutilating their genitals, ‘altering their body … through hormone therapy,’ ‘adding or removing breast tissue,’ and ‘changing their name.'”

Axing artificial food coloring

The HHS outlined a plan in April to phase out all petroleum-based synthetic dyes from America’s food supply.

Vani Hari, a critic of the food industry who founded Food Babe, told Blaze News in November that the brighter artificial colors, which are helpful with sales and attractive to children, are harmful to their health.

“The science shows that these dyes cause hyperactivity in children, can disrupt the immune system, and are contaminated with carcinogens,” said Hari.

Red dye 40, for instance, has been linked in some studies to hyperactivity disorders in children, and, according to the Cleveland Clinic, has various potential side effects, including depression, irritability, and migraines.

A 2021 paper in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Nutrition noted that blue dye 1 has been found to cause chromosomal aberrations and “was found to inhibit neurite growth and act synergistically with L-glutamic acid in vitro, suggesting the potential for neurotoxicity.”

In short order, the U.S Food and Drug Administration kicked off the process of revoking authorization for Citrus Red No. 2 and Orange B in the short term and to eliminate another six synthetic dyes — FD&C Green No. 3, FD&C Red No. 40, FD&C Yellow No. 5, FD&C Yellow No. 6, FD&C Blue No. 1, and FD&C Blue No. 2 — by the end of next year.

RELATED: RFK Jr. torches vaccine panel to make consequences count again

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

The FDA also requested that companies move up their timelines for the removal of FD&C Red No. 3.

“These poisonous compounds offer no nutritional benefit and pose real, measurable dangers to our children’s health and development,” Kennedy said in a statement. “That era is coming to an end. We’re restoring gold-standard science, applying common sense, and beginning to earn back the public’s trust.”

Numerous food manufacturers and fast-food chains have fallen in line or taken big steps in the right direction, including General Mills; Kraft Heinz; Starbucks; PepsiCo; Danone North America; TreeHouse Foods; Tyson Foods; and In-N-Out Burger.

In addition to tackling synthetic dyes, the HHS has paved the way for the use of food coloring from natural sources. In May, the FDA granted new color additive petitions for galdieria extract blue, butterfly pea flower extract, and calcium phosphate.

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