The Make America Healthy Again movement – which claims it wants to save Americans from the evil clutches of toxic, self-interested corporations – would seem to have quite questionable taste in heroes. The leader of the movement, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., obviously comes to mind, but more recently, there is another person who is gaining fascination with MHA: the disgraced founder of Theranos (arguably a very selfish corporation), Elizabeth Holmes.
Politico says the MHA movement is condemning the convicted fraudster and questioning whether he was unfairly crucified by the justice system. Notably, MHA-influencer Jessica Reed Cross recently wrote an article on her Substack titled “Elizabeth Holmes’ Redemption Arc Loading.” Cross writes:
Many people still think of Theranos, in which a faulty machine dramatically spewed blood, as a passive prop, the source of its downfall. Digging deeper, I found another (more practical angle) that depicted Holmes as a destructive threat to the trillion-dollar industry controlled by the conglomerate in which the masked Pfizer had interests emerging.
Throughout the blog post, Cross questioned the official narratives about Holmes, complimenting the disgraced entrepreneur for her “entrepreneurial advice and thoughts on health, faith and balance”, as well as praising her for “cultural figures like Elon Musk, RFK Jr. and Charlie Kirk”, and writing that she appreciated the convict’s style of posting on X:
Updates like her diary offer a window into motherhood behind bars. He has written nearly 3,000 letters to his children, expressing longing and faith, and sharing family photos and illustrations.
Others at MAHA also had good things to say about Holmes. For example, longevity enthusiast Brian Johnson occasionally chats with Holmes online.
On the one hand, this isn’t the first time that people have tried to look at Holmes and Theranos from a slightly more charitable perspective. People have noted that she was incredibly young when she started Theranos (19) and that her mission (to revolutionize blood testing) was largely idealistic. On the other hand, the details of Holmes’ misdeeds are well known, and he was convicted of several counts of fraud.
It simply makes some sense that the MHA movement would present a notorious fraudster as a misunderstood health hero, as critics have argued that the MHA’s leading proponent, RFK Jr., offered similar “misunderstood” solutions to America’s ongoing health crises. While Holmes sold biotechnology services that didn’t work, Kennedy wants you to believe that cod liver oil can cure measles, that the US doesn’t need a vaccine advisory committee, Tylenol gives you autism, and that the guy tasked with running the CDC doesn’t need any training in medicine. While Kennedy may sincerely believe these unorthodox things (just as Holmes might have believed that his biotech firm could ultimately help a lot of people), it does not make them any less harmful to America’s health establishment, nor to the millions of Americans who rely on it.
As we have noted previously, there are also clear and present obstacles to MAHA’s success. To crack down on the trillion-dollar industries controlled by the conglomerates that Cross criticizes would require federal regulatory action and, as we all know, the Trump administration is not a big fan of that kind of thing. Indeed, under Trump and Kennedy, the federal health bureaucracy is being disempowered, not empowered.
It’s not that America couldn’t use the health movement—it could. But, like Kennedy, the MHA movement focuses its attention and energy in all the wrong directions.