I was highly debating wearing a mask (I don't even want to know what the coverage rate was for routine vaccines in the room that day) but I have a strong feeling that I wouldn't have made it past the door with it

Thank you for your kind words. The full article should be accessible if you register for a free account.

My favorite part was they had the standard shitty conference coffee. But they labelled as "organic coffee"

This self-described 'MAHA mom' took issue with the tortilla chips they served
www.themahareport.com/p/inside-the...

Read my full story here!

Psychedelics and immortality: Nature went to a health summit starring RFK and JD Vance

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

And yes, the swag bags. Attendees received MAHA-branded tote bags with:

- Packets of creatine
- Beef tallow potato chips ($79 for a 6-pack!!)
- Mouth tape
- RFK Jr's biography
- Beef protein bars

As I was leaving I saw out of the corner of my eye former CDC director Robert Redfield out of the corner of my eye.

I figured I had to go see if he's speak with me. And he did:

“We didn’t have anything like this” during Trump 1.0, he told me. “Bobby has gotten industry to sit down with him.”

The summit was something of a coming-of-age moment for MAHA: It began as a loose network of RFK Jr supporters around the country.

But now it has the ear of top Trump/MAGA officials, Big Business, and influencers. They're thinking about cementing MAHA's legacy beyond RFK, attendees told me.

Even some MAHA supporters were frustrated by the lack of scientists.

One woman argued that you need the scientific establishment to enact change from within.

“But they’re seen as all corrupt by Kennedy and his inner circle,” she told me, who “want to punish them for their role in COVID”.

The summit also exposed rifts in MAHA world. Some hailed treatments like psychedelics & new obesity drugs.

But that's against the anti-pharma ethos that permeates MAHA.

“I don’t like taking medications,” Vance said, pointing to ibuprofen. “I don’t like taking anything unless I absolutely have to.”

Bryan Johnson also encouraged attendees to have more sex. Lower your resting heart rate before bed, he told attendees, other than for sex.

“Sex is such a great thing for health… you have to take the opportunity when it presents itself, even if it raises your heart rate.”

And then there was Bryan Johnson, a Silicon Valley multimillionaire known for his extreme anti-ageing ‘biohacks’, like receiving plasma from his teenage son.

Johnson, on a quest to live forever, wants “competing for the best biomarkers of anybody in the world” to be something of a new sport.

JD Vance said the quiet part out loud, alluding to COVID-19:

“As we found out the hard way over the last few years,” very often that people outside the scientific mainstream “were right and all the experts were wrong”, he said, to loud cheers from the audience.

The NIH director told attendees the NIH doesn't do enough innovative research.

“What puts lives at risk is doing research that’s incremental,” Bhattacharya said. “All it does is advance the careers of the researchers that do it. It results in publications that don’t get used and aren’t replicable.”

A strange mishmash of influencers, anti-ageing entrepreneurs, Big Business leaders (Walmart, Google) and top govt officials gathered at the ritzy Waldorf Astoria in DC.

Notably absent were any academic researchers or clinicians. Instead, panelists criticized the medical establishment all day long.