At ‘Make America Healthy Again’ summit, Vance praises RFK Jr. for defying convention

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President JD Vance on Wednesday praised Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s willingness to question established science and embrace nontraditional voices in the health care space, saying that often throughout history, “all the experts were wrong.”

In remarks in a fireside chat between the two men at a “Make America Healthy Again” summit in the nation’s capital, Vance also propped up Kennedy’s MAHA movement, saying it has been “a critical part of our success in Washington.”

Vance’s words show how Kennedy, whose wrecking-ball approach to public health agencies and longstanding vaccine skepticism have made him a polarizing figure among the public and in Congress, has been embraced by the White House as a needed force for change.

“Of all the specific initiatives that you guys have worked on effectively, the most important thing is that your team is willing to ask questions that people in government haven’t been asking in a long time,” Vance told Kennedy onstage.

The Vance-Kennedy event was livestreamed, but the summit was otherwise off limits to the press.

Even as President Donald Trump and Kennedy have disagreed on issues from COVID-19 vaccines to abortion, the White House this year has largely left Kennedy alone as he has made sweeping changes to the agencies he leads, including laying off thousands of workers, firing science advisers and remaking vaccine guidelines.

The Trump administration has touted Kennedy’s efforts to phase out artificial dyes in foods, wage war on ultra-processed foods and update the national dietary guidelines. As health secretary, he has said he wants to find the root causes of chronic disease and help Americans reduce their exposure to toxins.

Critics, including some of the country’s leading medical associations, say that Kennedy’s disregard for established science is fomenting public distrust in mainstream medicine and that his views, once considered fringe, are being amplified from his perch as health secretary. Kennedy and his allies dispute that their agenda is anti-science.

Vance nodded to the fact that many in Kennedy’s network don’t come from conventional medical circles, and some have more experience in business than in health. In fact, many of the health secretary’s close allies and new hires have outright rejected medical consensus on topics including vaccines and how to heal chronic disease.

“We’ve got to be comfortable challenging some of these old orthodoxies, and part of that is welcoming people that are a little unusual,” Vance said.

Vance noted Kennedy’s interest in disrupting bureaucracy comes under a president with a similar mentality.

“That is a good summary of Donald J. Trump is that he takes a bulldozer to Overton windows every single day,” Vance said. The Overton window refers to “the range of policies considered acceptable by the majority of a population,” according to Britannica.com.

The MAHA event at a Washington hotel came on the heels of a different meeting in Austin, Texas, that welcomed several of the same attendees — the annual conference of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group Kennedy used to lead.

That conference over the weekend, which featured Kennedy’s wife, Cheryl Hines, as a headline speaker, was more squarely focused on immunizations, with sessions such as “The Enduring Nightmare of COVID mRNA Technology” and “Understanding the Enormity of Vaccine Injury.”

Wednesday’s packed house of Trump administration officials, biotech entrepreneurs, MAHA influencers and others included sessions about topics such as how artificial intelligence is being used in health care, reversing aging, making food healthier and more.

MAHA Action, the Kennedy-supporting group hosting the event, said Trump’s embrace of the movement marks “a decisive turning point in U.S. health policy.”

“Today is an important milestone,” Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action, said in the release. “It’s the culmination of a movement that was 40 years in the making.”