Vance courts MAHA movement as 2028 positioning intensifies

Summit draws corporate sponsors as MAHA grassroots fracture widens

Vice President JD Vance used his September 29 appearance at the second annual Make America Healthy Again summit in Washington to position himself as the inheritor of Make America Great Again (Maga), The Guardian reported, and to align himself with Maha — a movement that many in the Trump administration believe helped to win the 2024 election — in a move that signals a greater overlap between the two movements. The vice president also took a swipe at Secretary of State Marco Rubio, his closest political rival. Vance told the audience that he and Kennedy text in a group chain with other cabinet secretaries “where we’re basically beating social media to the memes,” and joked that Rubio “doesn’t have a great poker face,” which he said made for “absolutely incredible” meme material — including, Vance said, an image of Rubio in a blonde wig circulated after Dolly Parton’s death. Vance also spoke at the MAHA summit in 2025, according to The Guardian, and has long viewed Kennedy’s faction as essential to Trump’s success.

The outreach comes as the Trump administration’s popularity plummets amid the war in Iran and rising prices, according to The Guardian. More Americans view the president and vice president unfavorably than favorably, according to a January Pew Research survey, and an AP-KFF poll found that 68 percent of rural MAHA supporters — voters who overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2024 — said administration health policies have had a negative effect or no impact on the health of people where they live.

At the summit, Vance highlighted his role leading the administration’s anti-fraud task force and claimed that it had uncovered close to $250 billion in fraud across Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act marketplace, blaming the losses on immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants. “We’ve found close to $250bn in fraud just since I’ve been leading the anti-fraud task force,” Vance said. He added that “the states that administer the programs don’t enforce them at all,” and claimed that undocumented people were receiving Medicare benefits, telling the audience, “Cut that shit out and be honest about your intentions. It’s about giving benefits to illegal aliens.” The Guardian reported that the administration has released scant details on who has been unenrolled from these programs and why the activity was considered fraudulent, and that there is no documentation that undocumented people are receiving Medicare benefits.

Kennedy alluded to the more cost-efficient health systems of Europe, which have universal healthcare, to speak about the inefficiencies of the US health system, where costs have been “allowed to get out of control,” The Guardian reported. Vance seemed to point to the need for stronger regulation of the health system, saying that programs like Medicaid and Medicare are stronger when fraud can be detected — though the Trump administration has largely focused on deregulation.

The corporate footprint at the summit was unusually heavy for a movement that began as an uneasy alliance of environmental, nutrition, and anti-vaccine activists. Sponsors included UnitedHealth, Walmart, and the AI company Anthropic, as well as Grail, an experimental cancer-treatment company whose approval is currently before the Food and Drug Administration. According to reporting by Bloomberg, companies that paid $300,000 were given the option of speaker slots and a private dinner with Kennedy and Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Other featured speakers included Brooke Rollins, secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, and Stefanie Spear, a top Kennedy aide.

The event was organized by the Maha Center, one of several MAHA-affiliated endeavors run by Tony Lyons, a longtime vaccine critic who has paid Kennedy $4 million in the past year, according to The Guardian. Tickets were available to “Maha members” who pay $6,000 a year to Maha Holdings, whose sole board member is Finn Kennedy, Kennedy’s 29-year-old son. The annual membership structure gave paying members access to the same stage as the corporate sponsors.

The corporate tilt drew sharp criticism from outside observers. Art Caplan, professor emeritus at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, called the summit a “giant conflict of interest” and an “ethically disturbing” example of “pay to play” access to senior Trump administration officials. “Normally, you don’t get a chance to cozy up to FDA officials. That’s troubling,” Caplan said. He described Vance’s appearance as a political calculation aimed at consolidating the MAHA base behind his own expected 2028 bid. “I think Vance was there making a calculation. He wants to replicate what Trump did, get the Maha devotees on his side, not Rubio’s,” Caplan said.

MAHA’s own grassroots activists said the speaker lineup reflected the movement’s drift. Mary Talley Bowden, a doctor who opposes Covid vaccines and was reprimanded for stealthily providing unproven Covid treatments, posted on X: “Why are they excluding our voices?” Kelly Ryerson, an activist known online as the Glyphosate Girl, said the lineup did “not reflect the issues that birthed the original Maha movement and drove voters, especially women, to show up and vote for this coalition,” and added that some of the speakers “could not be less Maha.” Robert Malone, a conspiracy theorist who voted to restrict vaccines while a member of the now-halted federal vaccine advisory committee, wrote on his Substack that MAHA has been “captured” by the very corporate interests it sought to fight, decrying what he called the “incestuous nature” of the movement and writing that “conflicts of interest seem to multiply by the day.”

Kennedy himself, who has long railed against corporate influence on American health, was notably quiet about corporate power at the event, and instead praised companies including OpenAI, which holds millions of dollars in US government contracts. “Today, it would be malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or to make a prescription without at least checking AI,” Kennedy said, attributing the remark to OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Kennedy added that large language models “can give you a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country.” He framed AI as a check on public-health authorities: “We’re never, ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us ‘trust the experts.’” If someone says “masks work, trust the experts,” AI “may tell you otherwise,” he said, and if someone says “social distancing works, trust the experts,” AI “may correct that,” and if someone says “a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection, so you need to take it to protect your grandmother,” AI “may say ‘it actually doesn’t do that.’” Kennedy said AI “really has the capacity to dominate us and free us from medical tyranny.” Caplan said Kennedy’s “fringy science agenda was on full display” at the event, and added that if Kennedy aligns himself with Vance and Vance wins the election, “it gives him power to pursue some things that he cares about.” About 32 percent of Americans consult AI for medical information and advice, and AI chatbots are inaccurate about 25 percent of the time, according to figures cited by The Guardian.

For Vance, the calculation Caplan described cuts both ways. “If he can get half of what Trump got, even if there’s a split, he’s doing well,” Caplan said. Fewer than one in four Americans — 23 percent — view Kennedy favorably, according to a survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center cited by The Guardian, a weakness Vance will have to navigate as he tries to claim the movement without inheriting its most polarizing figure’s standing.