Photo: Alamy
President Trump participated on Thursday in a special Make America Health Again Commission event celebrating a big milestone since the commission’s creation just a few months ago: the presentation of their first report.
Chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the MAHA movement has been a key component of President Trump’s agenda since welcoming his former political opponent into his campaign last summer.
“Over the past few years, we’ve built an unstoppable coalition of moms and dads, doctors and young people, and citizens of all backgrounds who have come together to protect our children [and] very importantly keep the dangerous chemicals out of our food supplies, get toxic substances out of our environment, and deliver the American people the facts as to, really, where we’re going,” President Trump said.
The president vowed that this administration would “not be silenced or intimidated by the corporate lobbyists or special interests,” aiming instead to demand answers because the public wants them.
Trump highlighted some key findings from the report, including rising rates of obesity in children, alarmingly high autism rates, and skyrocketing childhood cancer cases.
The president said the MAHA Commission would “develop a roadmap to bold and transformative public health reforms for our consideration.”
Trump was joined during the commission event by Kennedy and other members of his cabinet and the commission, such as Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, and others.
Secretary Kennedy also offered a few comments during the event, thanking Trump for his bold leadership on the issue of the chronic disease epidemic.
“I want to thank you for your vision, for your courage, [and] for standing up,” Kennedy said, describing Trump as a “populist president.”
He added, “I’ve met every president since my uncle was president and I’ve never seen a president, Democrat or Republican, that is willing to stand up to industry when it’s the right thing to do…I’ve never seen anything like it and I’m very, very grateful.”
Ultimately, Kennedy described “The MAHA Report” as a “call to action for common sense,” noting that this is the core value that underlies each issue they examined.
The 69-page report, subtitled “Making Our Children Health Again,” offers a comprehensive assessment and recommendations for chronic diseases ailing America’s youth.
Per the report, the commission identified four core forces driving the illness in American society today: poor diet, aggregation of environmental chemicals, lack of physical activity and chronic stress, and overmedicalization.
“The health of American children is in crisis. Despite outspending peer nations by more than double per capita on healthcare, the United States ranks last in life expectancy among high-income countries – and suffers higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes,” the report reads in its introduction.
Notably, President Trump highlighted his administration’s current work to approve SNAP waiver requests that will block taxpayer dollars from being used on unhealthy food stamp items, such as junk food or sugary drinks.
Secretary Rollins commented that at least a “dozen more” SNAP waivers were “coming down the line” and added that no administration has ever been able to accomplish such a thing.
Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, also highlighted the report’s findings that today’s children, on their current trajectory, would live shorter, unhealthier, and unhappier lives than their parents.
“We will reverse course so our kids will live longer than us, be more healthy than us, and will be happier than we have been,” he said, adding that this was an “enormously important moment” for America.
Read the full MAHA Report here.