Extracts below and a comment from me. Full text here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01683-6/fulltext
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The week beginning Aug 4, 2025 was the most dangerous and tragic week of Robert F Kennedy Jr's tenure yet: a fatal CDC shooting by a gunman distrustful of COVID-19 vaccines, the cancellation of US$500 million in mRNA research funding, and his malicious call to retract a peer-reviewed Annals of Internal Medicine paper on vaccine safety. RFK Jr has built an increasingly powerful movement in Make America Healthy Again (MAHA). Either through incompetence or disinformation, the actions of this movement pose the greatest threat to the health of Americans and millions of people globally...
Kennedy and some leaders of the MAHA movement choose to nurture mistrust through disinformation and misdirect genuine concerns to align with an anti-science and anti-vaccine agenda. Supported by a band of wellness industry entrepreneurs and influencers who sometimes directly profit from these diversions, this is an agenda that will do nothing for trust, science, or for health.
[Make America Healthy Again] is 'a dangerous pseudoscientific programme of work that supports a corrupt and unscientific wellness industry, seeks to discredit mainstream medicine, and portrays institutions and experts as enemies, not partners'.
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COMMENT (NPW): The realisation of the goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information - a world where every person has access to reliable healthcare information to protect their own health and the health of others - can only be achieved by having a robust global evidence ecosystem. The system is founded on the robust generation, publishing, synthesis, packaging, signposting and application of evidence. Without support from government and without public trust in the translation of science into policy and practice, the system cannot function and evidence-informed health care is overtaken by ideology.
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org