‘Thank God for President Trump!’
So said RF Kennedy Junior – a life-long Democrat - after being sworn in as Secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS) at a ceremony in the American White House on Thursday last week (13th February 2025). In a short speech, he thanked the President for supporting him and summarised his plan for change. He told the press this would be about: “radical transparency and returning gold-standard science to the NIH (National Institutes of Health), the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and CDC (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention),” and “ending the corruption, ending the corporate capture of those agencies.” Kennedy will have new people at the top of these organisations redirecting research priorities and reshaping public policy towards food, farming, pharmaceuticals and health. He can now tackle the corporate corruption that has been manipulating policy, ensuring that the trillions of dollars spent by his department (and ultimately the American people) is used to make Americans healthy rather than sick.
This was a valentine’s day to remember. My husband and I sat down with a bottle of champagne to toast the quiet revolution. We never thought we would see this change in our lifetimes. Like so many other parents, we have a beloved child who became sick and disabled after his vaccines. His immune system was unable to cope, and he became increasingly sick with allergies, bowel problems, insomnia and anxiety, before being diagnosed with severe autism. Since realising what happened, one of our greatest worries has been about the next generation. The compounded effect of vaccinated mothers having children who are then further vaccinated is evident in the shocking statistics that Kennedy has repeated during his MAHA campaign. Countries like the UK and the USA spend a huge amount on ‘health’ and rates of chronic ill-health and disease have only gone up. Current policy and practice is not working, and Kennedy, Trump and an army of supporters are calling this out. The change in direction gives us immense hope that the next generation WILL be spared at least some of the neurological harm that was coming their way.
The MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement has prompted me to reflect on the challenges for those of us living in the UK. In some ways, a Make the UK Healthy Again (MUHA) campaign could be an easier sell. Although they got no credit from the chattering classes, our previous Conservative Governments implemented reforms to support more sustainable farming (in what is called the Environmental Land Management scheme). There was also a government-backed independent inquiry into the food system, chaired by Henry Dimbleby that published a list of sensible policy reforms that were ready to go.
Food and farming aside, however, neither Conservatives nor Labour have been willing to take on the pharmaceutical industry. What’s more, our nationalised health service and associated regulatory bodies make it easier to control the public debate. Opening things up would require taking on a phalanx of regulatory bodies including the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the 23 Royal Colleges that represent each medical discipline, the General Medical Council (GMC), and British Medical Association (BMA), as well as the research funding organisations such as the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Medical Research Council (MRC) and Wellcome Trust, and research journals such as the Lancet and the British Medical Journal. Health research, policy and practice is overseen by an alphabet soup of unelected bodies, all reliant on peer-led appointment that inevitably incorporate people who are heavily dependent on pharmaceutical funding for their careers and success. Any doctor who is willing to speak out about drug and vaccine safety and call for more rigorous and independent research would be beyond the pale of appointment. As was dramatically demonstrated during the Covid pandemic, doctors regularly turn on other doctors and medical researchers who dare to speak out.
The American case highlights the power of building a social movement that comes from outside the official bureaucracy, incorporating the parents of vaccine-damaged children, the alternative health and fitness industry (which is growing as a response to the failures of the mainstream), and the independent doctors and researchers who are able and willing to speak out. The MAHA movement was led by parents who never gave up sharing their experiences and talking to anyone who would listen to them – including RF Kennedy Junior.
Through his willingness to cross the aisle and find allies amongst his political ‘enemies’, Kennedy has found the answer to his prayers. He is now set to make a radical difference to the way things are done. Just last week, Trump and Kennedy launched a Make America Healthy Again Commission to report on childhood health in the next 100 days with a strategy to be published in the following two months. This will involve looking at childhood ill-health, the current use of medicines and what can be done to turn things around. The Executive Order signed to launch the Commission declared:
“In 2022, an estimated 30 million children (40.7 percent) had at least one health condition, such as allergies, asthma, or an autoimmune disease. Autism spectrum disorder now affects 1 in 36 children in the United States — a staggering increase from rates of 1 to 4 out of 10,000 children identified with the condition during the 1980s. Eighteen percent of late adolescents and young adults have fatty liver disease, close to 30 percent of adolescents are prediabetic, and more than 40 percent of adolescents are overweight or obese… in the case of Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, over 3.4 million children are now on medication for the disorder — up from 3.2 million children in 2019-2020 — and the number of children being diagnosed with the condition continues to rise.”[i]
The findings of this Commission and associated policy changes will inevitably travel across the Atlantic to fuel debate about policy and practice in the UK. It may re-energise the movements that challenged compulsory vaccination, standardised treatment and censorship during the Covid pandemic when many people realised that official health policy was making them sick. At that time many people stood firm against the compulsion to vaccinate themselves and their children, even at the risk of losing their jobs.
The same was true 140 years ago when negative experience prompted parents to resist the compulsory vaccination of their children for smallpox, facing fines and even prison as a result. Witnessing the devastating side-effects from vaccines, including death, as well as the failure to prevent disease, prompted widespread resistance. A very large demonstration was organised by the Anti-Vaccination League in March 1885 in the City of Leicester. The procession was fronted by the men who had been sent to prison, followed by those who had been fined and had their goods seized for resisting forced vaccination. These martyrs, as they were called at the time, were followed by a wagon carrying unvaccinated children with a banner declaring “They that are whole need not a physician”.
A locally elected councillor addressed the crowd of thousands, telling them that: “A large and increasing number of the public are of the opinion that the best way to get rid of small pox and similar diseases is to use plenty of water, eat good food, live in light and airy houses and see that the Corporation keep the streets clean and the drains in order.”[i] The City Corporation (or Council as it would be called today) then stopped compulsory vaccination and pursued a policy of strict quarantine and sanitation that saw a sharp reduction in disease without mass vaccination. Local people and their political representatives defied national mandates and medical experts to experiment with the development of an alternative approach. What became known as the ‘Leicester method’ demonstrated the power of a decentralised and fully accountable public health system that was close to the people it served.
Looking at the current vaccine schedules for children’s first year of life is truly alarming. Children in the UK are expected to have 13 vaccinations against 14 diseases which is an increase on the number that made our son profoundly autistic.
In the USA, children are expected to have a similar suite of injections with Covid-19 added as well.
It is obvious to me that these vaccines have a cumulative effect on our psychological, immunological and neurological health. However, the Leicester experience points to the importance of challenging the status quo with a good alternative plan. Rather than just being against something, the activists in the Anti-Vaccination League and their supporters in local government had a practical alternative to which they could point. The success of quarantine and sanitation in controlling disease, reducing death and ill-health allowed them to trump the sceptics and challenge the authorities.
So too today, the MAHA campaign has a positive message about the importance of good food, exercise, sunlight, stronger families and communities as ways to strength natural immunity, health and well-being. This is likely to appeal to a broad audience, some of whom are heavily invested in the status quo and will never feel able or willing to change their minds about the supposed safety and benefits of vaccination.
The American community organiser Saul Alinsky taught that the ‘The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative’ and this is true in building any campaign. It is not enough to just be against something, as winning sufficient allies to make change demands a positive alternative. As the people of Leicester said of their children; they are as ‘whole’ as their natural immune systems allow them to be. Support for improving our natural immunity is a positive message that can sideline the current reliance on vaccines and drugs. It is a call to organise around our own health rather than following the orders that come from on high. Our lives and those of our children’s children depend on it.
[i] Humphries and Bystrianyk, Dissolving Illusions, 2013, p.121.
[i] Establishing The President's Make America Healthy Again Commission – The White House