Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump, encouraging his followers to vote for him in the presidential election under a new, slightly familiar slogan: “Make America Healthy Again.”

“Our big priority will be to clean up the public health agencies like the CDC, NIH, FDA, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” Kennedy said, referring to the pillars of federal public health regulation: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. He promised in a video announcing the campaign that began with him selling green "MAHA" hats and merch.

The MAHA Alliance super PAC gives new legs to the so-called medical freedom movement, in which Kennedy — an environmental activist who has made multiple false or misleading claims about vaccines but does not see himself as an anti-vaccine advocate — is seen as a leader. Although the movement has existed essentially since the country was founded, it reached a boiling point during the COVID-19 pandemic and in recent years has elected its backers to positions of power on the boards of hospitals and in local elections around the country. Anti-vaccine bills have also been making it further in state legislatures.

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Once seen as a political movement on the margins, composed mostly of libertarians opposed to vaccines, the medical freedom movement has expanded to unite supporters across party lines, merging the far-right with what some have called the “crunchy granola” new-age alternative medicine voters on the far-left. It champions a platform that values personal liberties above the medical establishment and opposes government public health and regulatory agencies.

"Vaccines, over the last 100 years or so, have allowed us to live 30 years longer than we used to."

“I think Kennedy is trying to draw from both of those streams,” said Wendy Parmet, faculty co-director at the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University. “For Trump, obviously Kennedy is a potential way of reaching some anti-establishment groups that otherwise might think of themselves as on the left, because he also, unlike traditional Republicans, talks........

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