I’ve noticed that Dr. Jay Richards has been talking a lot about the role that government plays in guiding the health of American citizens. I am so far behind on this, so I have to catch up. Basically, there is concern that government agencies are guiding Americans poorly because they are too close to Big Pharma and Big Food. And it is causing us a lot of health problems.

Well, I noticed that Jay wrote an article for Daily Signal about MAHA, and I think it’s a really good article to explain what the Trump administration is supposed to solve.

First, he explains how we got here:

Although RFK, Jr. is famous—or infamous, depending on your view—for his criticisms of vaccines, that wasn’t the theme of his lengthy speech. He spoke instead about an unholy alliance—a cartel—of industries, corporate media, government regulatory agencies, and even nonprofit “charities” that is making us fat and sick. This problem doesn’t fit the simple taxonomy of “public” and “private” or “left” and “right” that served us well during the Cold War.

Kennedy has been a voice in the wilderness warning about this cartel for years. Most Americans first became aware of it during the 2020 pandemic. Here’s the basic story: COVID-19 itself was likely the product of dangerous gain-of-function research conducted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. That’s bad enough. But Communist China didn’t act alone. This work was funded, at least in part, by the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Health and laundered through the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

One point is that critics of the cartel were suppressed:

Once the virus was out, the absurd and counterproductive lockdowns and hygiene theater were pushed by global entities such as the World Health Organization. Domestically, Francis Collins, then-head of the NIH, and Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, worked to undermine independent experts who criticized the federal bureaucrats’ favored policies.

Collins and Fauci even orchestrated the publication of a deceptive article in Nature that claimed the virus had a natural origin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal entities, including the Biden White House, pressured social media platforms to censor even the best-credentialed dissenters.

Attentive Americans soon learned that public health, as a field, focuses on nudging whole populations, rather than seeking the health of individual patients.

Another key point – the cartel companies cannot be sued for any damages they cause:

Certain pharmaceutical companies—which pay royalties to many NIH staff, including Collins and Fauci—enjoyed a suspiciously fast and less than rigorous approval process for their mRNA “vaccines.” Vaccine mandates then created a massive artificial market for the drugs. And drug companies’ immunity from legal liability allowed them to enjoy the financial benefits of these policies without facing the downside risks from any long-term harm to those who took the vaccines.

Many Americans started to mistrust their doctors, because they were pushing drugs and surgeries on their children:

Then, during the lockdowns, the growing awareness of the “gender-industrial complex”— media, medical professionals, pharmaceutical companies, politicians, and others who push ghoulish “gender-affirming” interventions on people distressed about their sexed bodies—further reinforced the lack of credibility of private and public health authorities.

Jay says that these symptoms – lockdowns, mandates, persecution of scientific dissent – are all the work of “the cartel”, which is composed of actors from Big Government, Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Media.

Jay then switches over to the specific problems that the cartel is alleged to have caused:

In his speech, Kennedy devoted many paragraphs to the “chronic disease epidemic”—including ever higher rates, even among children, of Type II diabetes and obesity, and of Alzheimer’s, which some now refer to as “Type III diabetes.”

[…]He spoke of “an explosion of neurological illnesses that I never saw as a kid,” including: “ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s Syndrome, narcolepsy, ASD, Asperger’s, autism. In the year 2000, the Autism rate was one in 1500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36, according to CDC; nationally, nobody’s talking about this.”

He also spoke of the massive spikes in the use of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs.

So, that’s the problem that Kennedy and his allies in the Trump administration need to solve.

For me, two of the biggest red flags are 1) the persecution of qualified dissenting scientists, and 2) the threats of ending the employment of people who don’t want to take medications where the manyfacture is immune to being sued. Those factors right there alerted me to the existence of “the cartel”, and now I’m just hoping that Kennedy is the right person to do something about it. I’m not convinced that he is, but I think it’s positive that Jay thinks he is.