The second Make America Healthy Again Summit brought together Trump administration officials, insurers, corporate executives, and wellness influencers to discuss affordability, the U.S. food supply, the food pyramid, and the use of AI in healthcare. The Hill, along with many other mainstream outlets, was not granted press credentials but watched a free livestream.
The event featured nine publicly traded companies, including insurance industry giants, artificial intelligence firms, Walmart, and pharmaceutical companies. As Bloomberg reported, some companies were offered access to officials for a fee. One of the main sponsors was Grail, a company awaiting FDA approval for a cancer blood test.
Scott Morris, a senior vice president at Walmart, spoke about "real food" on a panel that included Michael Boes, chief MAHA officer at fast-food company Steak 'n Shake, and Jonathan Neman, the CEO of the salad-focused restaurant chain Sweetgreen.
Members of the grassroots MAHA base feel the movement is selling out. "Nothing screams medical freedom like UnitedHealth, Elevance Health, Walmart, GRAIL, ResMed, Compass Pathways, Definium Therapeutics, Hims & Hers, Noom, Advocate Health, Sutter Health, Anthropic and OpenAI," Robert Malone, a MAHA activist and former member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine advisory panel, wrote on social media. In a subsequent Substack post, Malone noted that MAHA "was supposed to expose the revolving door between money, industry and government, not build its own."
The MAHA movement could be at a crossroads ahead of key midterm elections. MAHA helped give President Trump an important ally in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime Democrat before he endorsed Trump and joined his administration. And Kennedy gave Trump and Republicans access to a new group of voters. But the base is increasingly at odds about the administration's relationship to their core policy goals including eliminating pesticides and chemicals in food supplies, eating healthy instead of ultra-processed foods, and changing the nation's vaccination policies.
The first panel of the summit dealt with psychedelic medicine, a topic the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently begun gathering insight into. HHS Deputy General Counsel Matthew Zorn was joined by the CEOs of three separate companies developing psychedelics for use in mental health care, including those looking into the potential uses of psilocybin. None of the companies represented during the discussion currently have any FDA-approved products.
Kabir Nath, CEO of Compass Pathways, said investigating psilocybin could be the future of addressing treatment-resistant depression. "You have 4 million people in the U.S. who have what's characterized as treatment-resistant depression," said Nath. "There is a huge shortfall between what we are able to offer people today and what we want to be able to do in the future and as we'll talk about, we all believe that psychedelics have the potential to offer hope for those patients."
Kennedy has long been a critic of commonly used antidepressants, particularly SSRIs, arguing they are overprescribed in the U.S. and has previously claimed they could be linked to violence and mass shootings. Earlier in September, the FDA held a hearing to gather public comments on therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs.
One of the more incongruous moderators on the day was comedian Russell Brand, who led a panel comprised of CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz and Brillman. At the start of their panel, Oz quipped, "Russell Brand was backstage hugging the Secretary of Agriculture, but here he is." Brand responded, "She initiated that contact I shall make clear, doctor," drawing a laugh from Oz.
Brand's appearance on Tuesday precedes his upcoming trial in London next month over multiple charges of rape and sexual assault. He has pleaded not guilty to three counts of rape, three charges of sexual assault and one allegation of indecent assault - all in connection with allegations made by six women about incidents that took place between 1999 and 2009, The Hollywood Reporter wrote in March. In April, he acknowledged engaging in what he called "exploitative" consensual sex with a 16-year-old girl when he was 30 during an interview with Megyn Kelly.
The British comedian has become enmeshed in the MAHA movement through regular appearances at events and briefings hosted by the MAHA Action nonprofit group that supports Kennedy's agenda. In a discussion hosted by MAHA Action in September, Brand said, "I'm very proud of my affiliation with MAHA and strongly believe it wil become increasingly important as the divisiveness that's defined American culture and perhaps culture more broadly for certainly the last … it's just getting worse, isn't it?"
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