These days, when it comes to public health, moms feel a little like a jilted lover with trust issues. During the COVID response five years ago, moms were betrayed by the very public health officials charged with warning us of certain dangers and keeping Americans healthy. Since then it’s only gotten worse. Now, feeling jittery, suspicious, and worried about the safety of the nation's food supply, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical field, many moms wonder: How can I trust these people ever again?
That’s why so many moms, like me, are thrilled about MAHA—the Make America Healthy
The trajectory of the MAHA movement is easy to trace. When chatter began in early 2020 about an infectious disease spreading across the globe, moms in America assumed public health professionals had their and their families’ best interests at heart. Initially, they believed that the stay-home rules, the closed-school and mask requirements, the shuttering of businesses, and the draconian hospital and nursing home policies were sensible precautions. Moms gave grace—lots of it—for months on end until they came to a painful conclusion.
They realized they were in an abusive relationship.
These public health officials didn’t have their best interests at heart. To the contrary, many of the people in charge of the COVID response were playing politics at best, and more often, seemed to be bent on following the Obama administration’s famous adage of “not letting a good crisis go to waste” and using it to expand their power.
As a mom of three kids myself, how could I conclude anything else when I was told that outdoor church services and kids’ sports events were strictly forbidden, but rioting and burning down buildings in the name of George Floyd was a-okay? Toddlers were forced to mask while celebrities and their political allies partied in close quarters. Even as data confirmed that maskless, in-person school attendance posed no meaningful risk and as many European countries returned to in-person, maskless instruction (in 2020!), our federal officials colluded with teachers unions to keep schools closed (while teachers were, of course, getting paid) for as long as possible. Parents daring to question this logic were then made targets by the FBI.
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Sometimes, unhealthy relationships can be saved. Through hard work, a willingness to take responsibility and apologize for past harms, along with a commitment to improve behaviors, some troubled couples find happiness again. Yet, moms quickly learned that the public health leadership is a cad and expert gaslighter who shows no interest in repairing the damage they’ve caused. Instead of accepting responsibility for the great harms it brought to the American public as a whole, and children in particular, public health leaders decided contrition is just not their thing.
To date, we’ve seen no apologies from Dr. Anthony Fauci, who remains defiant and continues to display shocking levels of arrogance toward those who want answers about COVID’s origins, his role in gain of function research, and why he actively smeared and deplatformed doctors and scientists who disagreed with his recommendations. Fauci’s partner in (literally) crime, Dr. Deborah Birx, has also failed to apologize, though she has admitted that the COVID shots shouldn't have been pushed on young people and that she knew (yet stayed silent) that the shot didn’t prevent getting or spreading the disease. Where are the apologies to the millions of Americans who unnecessarily got the shot, to the parents who were guilted or dishonestly persuaded to get their perfectly healthy children the shot, or to the people who were fired because they refused a vaccine they knew they didn’t need?
Also no word from CDC officials who colluded with the teachers unions to push for sustained closures of schools and masking, which has resulted in the stunting of an entire generation of children. Randi Weingarten, the highly paid head of one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, has nothing but pride for her efforts to keep schools closed and kids masked. She’s paid no price for pushing policies that led to well-documented and widespread cases of child suffering, suicide, abuse and isolation, childhood depression, and massive learning loss, from which most kids will never recover.
The media, which is supposed to be an even ally in holding public institutions accountable, profoundly failed the public, and moms won’t forget it. Establishment media fixtures made fun of those who were hesitant about or refused to get the COVID shot. They dismissed COVID’s origins and buried evidence about the failures of masks and lockdowns. Yet most have never apologized or even shown any self-reflection about how they got it so very wrong. Instead of apologies, we hear calls for a “pandemic amnesty” from a parenting columnist at The Atlantic. Elected officials have barely shown any interest in the sort of congressional oversight that might prevent a repeat response from the federal government. And let’s not forget the presidential pardons doled out by former President Biden to some of the chief architects of the COVID response, specifically to guarantee there would be no real accountability.
Is it any wonder we’re seeing a reckoning in the form of MAHA? Moms are thrilled that Robert F. Kennedy promises to shake things up at these agencies and to launch reviews of heretofore “settled science” on issues that matter to moms—childhood obesity, overprescription of medications for children, the root cause of autism, conflicts of interest in the nutrition and pharmaceutical approval process, and other areas of public health. He promises accountability and transparency. That’s exactly what the American public voted for.
RFK will likely bring something less tangible to the culture of public health—humility, curiosity, kindness, and a sense of duty to the American people. These concepts have clearly been lost in the public health arena. That must change if we want moms to ever again trust information from doctors, scientists, and public health officials.
We can all support the RFK’s efforts to Make Americans Healthy Again, but that must begin with Making Americans Trust Again!
Julie Gunlock is the director of Independent Women’s Network (iwnetwork.com). She also co-hosts WMAL’s O’Connor & Company.
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