MAHA activists upset over corporate sponsorship for summit featuring RFK Jr. and Vance

Make America Healthy Again activists are crying foul over the speaker list and corporate sponsors for the MAHA Summit on Tuesday in Washington, featuring Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Vice President JD Vance, and other Trump administration officials affiliated with the movement.Critics say that the summit’s host, the MAHA Center, has abandoned the skepticism of large healthcare corporations that ignited the grassroots base during the 2024 election cycle.Regenerative farming advocate Kelly Ryerson said the range of topics at the summit, including artificial intelligence in healthcare, reforms to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and using pharmaceuticals to “biohack” longevity, are not priorities for the MAHA coalition that helped elect Republicans in 2024. “The MAHA Summit lineup does not reflect the issues that birthed the original MAHA movement and drove voters, especially women, to show up and vote for this coalition,” Ryerson said via email. “I don’t recognize this version of MAHA.”Ryerson, who goes by the moniker “Glyphosate Girl” online, has been a staunch critic of the Trump administration’s approach to MAHA since the Justice Department sided with Bayer, the maker of the pesticide glyphosate, in its effort to shield the company from liability for failing to warn consumers about the risk of cancer from using its product.Ryerson said the event “should be hosting panels of regenerative ranchers, pesticide and PFAS experts, EMF scientists and integrative nutritionists.” She also said it was “off-target” for the MAHA Center to invite David Friedberg, a champion of genetically modified crops, to address the coalition on food reform policies.“Give me a break – could not be less MAHA,” Ryerson said.Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at the Republican convention Thursday, Sept. 10, 2026, in Dallas. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez) Dr. Robert Malone, a MAHA figure who rose to prominence because of his criticism of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, called the sponsorship and speaker list for the event “sickening.”Included among the corporate sponsors who contributed $300,000 for the event are Hims & Hers and Noom, both of which supply GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, as well as the AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI. Walmart, the third-largest retail pharmacy in the United States, is also funding the event.“Read the list of speakers and weep- MAHA-gov and MAHA-inc have completely divorced themselves from the health freedom movement,” Malone said in a post on X.The phrases “health freedom” and “medical freedom” are frequently used by grassroots activists as shorthand for skepticism about vaccines and opposition to vaccine mandates, which were the initial catalyst for the contemporary MAHA movement, which now also pursues food reform and regenerative agriculture.Malone was chosen by Kennedy last year to serve on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine safety advisory committee in part because of his association with the medical freedom movement and his skepticism of mRNA vaccine technology.Ultimately, however, Malone broke ties with the Trump administration in January after federal courts on procedural grounds blocked the CDC’s attempt to cut the number of recommended childhood vaccines from 18 to 11. Read the list of speakers and weep- MAHA-gov and MAHA-inc have completely divorced themselves from the health freedom movement.This is sickening. https://t.co/OCMh60vD6l— Robert W Malone, MD (@RWMaloneMD) September 28, 2026 Mary Talley Bowden, a Houston-based physician in the medical freedom movement who gained national prominence for touting Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19, also took to X to criticize the official MAHA summit.Bowden said Sunday on X that “grassroots MAHA has devolved into a cesspool of corporate interests,” adding that the “MAHA summit speaker list says it all.”“The medical freedom people who have been up in arms about the pandemic are not part of all this administration MAHA effort at all,” Bowden told the Financial Times ahead of the summit.Jennifer Galardi, a policy analyst with the MAHA-aligned policy division at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner that she is somewhat skeptical of some of the experts invited to the summit and the topics that will be discussed, particularly about pharmaceuticals and health insurance reforms.Galardi said she falls into the “hippie luddite” camp of the MAHA movement and will “definitely disagree with a portion of some of these conversations,” but she does not begrudge the MAHA Center for being open to discussing what she referred to as “different topics.”“I don’t want to go where the Left is going, like, ‘You can’t talk about this,’” Galardi said.When asked about the absence of vaccine policy topics at the MAHA summit, Galardi said no single event can address every issue within a broad political movement. She also noted that Kennedy was the keynote speaker earlier this month for the Washington summit of Children’s Health Defense, the antivaccine organization Kennedy founded and chaired until he ran for president in 2024.During his Children’s Health Defense speech, Kennedy not only addressed vaccine injuries but also highlighted a plethora of other MAHA issues outside of mainstream Republican politics, such as regenerative agriculture and wireless radiation.TRUMP SAYS HE IS DEMANDING DRUGMAKERS BREAK UP VACCINES INTO FIVE SHOTS TO PREVENT AUTISM“There’s many different poles holding up the MAHA tent,” Galardi said, “and I think that sometimes baffles people, even in the MAHA movement.”A spokesperson for HHS told the Washington Examiner the department and its officials “were not involved in the planning or sponsorship activities for the MAHA Summit.”