At MAHA Event, Trump Targets Corporate Lobbyists: ‘We Will Not Be Silenced'
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump held an event on Thursday at the White House to highlight the first report from the Commission to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA), which focuses on improving childhood health.
He pledged to make Americans healthier and said his administration would not be intimidated by corporations.
'Unlike other administrations, we will not be silenced or intimidated by the corporate lobbyists or special interests,' Trump said during the White House event.
He called on his cabinet members to take decisive action against the interest groups.
'In some cases, it won't be nice or won't be pretty, but we have to do it,' he said. 'And we will not allow our public health system to be captured by the very industries it's supposed to oversee.'
Trump established the commission in February. Its first report,
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The commission, chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will make policy proposals over the next 80 days.
Trump shared some alarming findings from the report, noting that over 40 percent of American children have at least one chronic health condition. He highlighted a nearly 50 percent rise in childhood cancer rates since the 1970s, and pointed out that childhood obesity has surged from under 5 percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today. Autism rates, he added, have also climbed sharply, from 1 in 10,000 a few decades ago to 1 in 31.
'They really are alarming, unbelievable, terrible,' Trump said. 'There's something wrong, and we will not stop until we defeat the chronic disease epidemic in America.'
The report explores the root causes of increasing sickness among children, pointing to factors such as ultra-processed foods, overmedication, and exposure to toxic chemicals.
'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, very importantly, keep the dangerous chemicals out of our food supplies, get toxic substances out of our environment,' Trump said.
'This movement has become very hot,' he said, referring to the MAHA movement.
He highlighted several actions already taken, including phasing out eight artificial food dyes, eliminating major conflicts of interest at the Food and Drug Administration, and approving Nebraska's SNAP waiver request to prevent taxpayer funds from contributing to childhood obesity.
Trump said requests are coming from other states as well.
At the event, Kennedy said he had never seen a president from either party willing to challenge the industry groups.
'My uncle tried to do this, but he was killed,' he said. 'And ever since then, we've been waiting for a president who would stand up and speak on behalf of the health of the American people.'
For too long, he said, the government has relied on biased research, while ignoring common sense or mothers' intuition.
Among the guests at the White House event was former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
'It's a huge shift from a sick care system to a health care system,' Gingrich told The Epoch Times after the event.
'I think Bobby Kennedy really made clear when he talked about what his uncle would have done if he hadn't been killed. And so, he's sort of sitting here now, living out what his uncle would have done.'
Speaking after the event, scientist and physician Robert Malone called the White House meeting 'unprecedented.'
'It was an amazing presentation, and I know the team is fully committed,' he told The Epoch Times, referring to Trump's officials who pledged to address the health care crisis.
Meanwhile, some critics say that the report paints an overly bleak picture of children's diseases in the United States and unfairly targets vaccines.
Some groups, including the National Corn Growers Association, criticized the report.
'The Make America Healthy Again Report is filled with fear-based rather than science-based misinformation about pesticides,' the association
'We are deeply troubled that claims of this magnitude are being made without any scientific basis or regard for a long history of EPA expert evaluations of these products.'
Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
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