In the Name of Health: First Reactions to the MAHA Report
In the Name of Health: First Reactions to the MAHA Report
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute
The first report from the Make America Healthy Again Commission is out, with a particular focus on children’s health. The relatively short report includes astonishing data on obesity, heart disease, diabetes, life expectancy, substance abuse, mental illness, and many other terribles.
The report is a shock, a painful read, a five-alarm fire, and the charts alone are astonishing. It is embedded below for your reading misery.
“This report—Make Our Children Healthy Again: Assessment—is a call to action. It presents the stark reality of American children’s declining health, backed by compelling data and long-term trends. More importantly, it seeks to unpack the potential dietary, behavioral, medical, and environmental drivers behind this crisis. By examining the root causes of deteriorating child health, this assessment establishes a clear, evidence-based foundation for the policy interventions, institutional reforms, and societal shifts needed to reverse course.”
Further:
“After a century of costly and ineffective approaches, the federal government will lead a coordinated transformation of our food, health, and scientific systems. This strategic realignment will ensure that all Americans—today and in the future—live longer, healthier lives, supported by systems that prioritize prevention, wellbeing, and resilience. But real transformation requires more than vision—it requires clarity. Before we act, we must fully understand the scope of the crisis, the conditions that created it, and the mechanisms through which it continues to grow. Without this foundation, interventions risk being reactive, fragmented, or ineffective.”
Again, the focus is on children, but the data pertain to the entire population.
Undoubtedly, the report will come as a shock to most Americans, and to American politics generally, even if the rest of the world is well aware.
Consider the implications of this moment, and the meaning for the epoch of history from which we might be leaving and into which we are moving.
In the big picture of five years, they locked us down, forced us to cover our faces, shut down all community activity, killed small business, canceled religious holidays, invited us to become addicted to screens and substances, and then forced an experimental and seemingly miraculous shot on the public, then even segregated cities by compliance status.
They did all of this in the name of health. A tyranny we never imagined possible – one for the ages – came to us with the claim that it was for our own well-being.
Five years later, we have now a huge government report that details a chronic (not infectious) disease crisis without precedent, traceable to mostly government-backed policies, including deteriorating mental and physical health, which the whole system of food, pharmaceuticals, and environmental exposure more generally is making worse. As documented, the issue long predates the lockdowns and even traces back a century.
That is an amazing reality, one that is almost impossible to process.
The Covid period was a defining moment of our lives, a time when the entire globe embraced the same despotism on order from governments, on advice from the World Health Organization, with guidance from and approval by the experts tasked with knowing what is best for us.
Freedom, they said, was sickness and death, while the path to wellness was maximum compliance with myriad inane attacks on rights and bodily autonomy.
The leaders of this effort were a parade of high credentials (and huge salaries) from the best institutions, in cooperation with all the commanding heights.
They had a free hand to do what they wished with us, with policies both preposterous and egregious. Essentially, they put us in cages and subjected us to a science experiment.
We had school and church closures, one-way grocery aisles, severe enforcements against wedding and funerals, mandatory shields between customer and employee, capacity restrictions in stores and restaurants, travel restrictions that kept loved ones apart, censorship of news and social media, closure of clinics for diagnostics, and forced embargoes on civic and commercial life.
We warned from the very beginning about the results. We yelled, cited research, pleaded for wisdom and historical understanding, accumulated vast amounts of dissident literature, and otherwise threw ourselves into saving civilization from these vandals operating in the name of science, the depredations of these devils with lab coats.
Five years later, we sit amidst a pile of rubble. In the intervening years, we’ve examined how and why this happened. What we have discovered is that this was not what it first appeared to be, merely an egregious error and misapplication of a failed paradigm. The corruption that led to the disaster was and is much deeper. It affects not just public health but pharmaceuticals, agriculture, technology, academia, media, politics, philosophy, and more.
Brownstone’s task since its founding has been to reexamine it all in a time when no one even seemed curious. The result is a shelf of books and the best research available in some two thousand five hundred articles in Brownstone Journal, plus events, fellowships, videos, and much more, including a vast international network that did not exist five years ago.
Yet even now, the curtain of secrecy and the cone of silence still surrounds this period, mostly because so many participated that they have erected taboos around the possibility of thorough investigation, much less justice. This is undoubtedly because of the truths deemed too terrible for public consumption.
From the beginning, we have wondered what the history books would say. Would those who claim that all of this was merely “common sense public health measures” prevail? Would the record really document the incredible falsehood that we were saved by the mutilation of rights and liberties followed by an mRNA injection?
The scions of the lockdowns and shots are still getting awards and emoluments from the most prestigious institutions. But at this stage, it seems performative. They are unlikely to prevail.
The team that prepared this remarkable report that urges action lived through these years with us. Some have Brownstone connections, for sure, which means that the long knives are already out for us. We’ll deal with it.
To be sure, the report doesn’t directly address the absurdities and evils of the last five years, much less advocate the far-reaching and even revolutionary reforms we need. This is likely due to the intractable limits of political possibility. Never underestimate the power of the status quo.
That said, it is the essential template to understand why the report exists at all. In other words, the worst years of our lives are gradually giving way to a possible future that is brighter, more truth-telling, freer, less full of lies and corporatist capture, and focused on evidence, wisdom, and genuine respect for people and our aspirations to live better lives.
Can it be said that the Covid period had a silver lining? It’s probably too soon to say that, but we can observe the following. The years 2020 to 2024 represented the apotheosis of at least a century of scientific conceit, elite arrogance, and government and corporate overreach into every area of our lives. That entire path is either on the verge of disrepute or perhaps even fully discredited.
The plaudits and awards for folly and the machinations of the powerful will continue for some years, no question. But their efforts seem ever more desperate.
This new MAHA report will be widely read with some degree of shock. We went through hell and back under extreme duress to protect ourselves from infectious disease, all while the real metrics of health were collapsing with no announcement at all. Now that we see, we cannot unsee, and we see much more than has been so far admitted.
In the Name of Health: First Reactions to the MAHA Report
by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society