Neuralink. Google. Walmart. Wearables. CRISPR. For supporters of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement, these are the names of companies and technologies that represent a threat to Americans’ health and bodily integrity.

But at last week’s MAHA Summit, these same entities and technologies took center stage.

The summit, held in Washington, D.C., brought together representatives of established and startup biomedical and biotechnology firms with key government officials — including U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and members of the MAHA grassroots movement.

STAT called it “a strange mix of bedfellows.”

The audience of “Trump administration officials, biotech entrepreneurs, MAHA influencers and others included sessions about topics such as how artificial intelligence is being used in health care, reversing aging, making food healthier and more,” The Associated Press reported.

For some, the presence of Big Tech firms, pharmaceutical companies and large retailers at a MAHA event represents a betrayal of MAHA’s key principles, including its mission to combat the chronic disease epidemic in the U.S. The list of attendees and sponsors evoked criticism from some MAHA supporters.

But for Finn Kennedy, a board member of MAHA Holdings, which organized the summit in partnership with MAHA Action, the summit’s goal was to “accelerate private industry’s adoption of the MAHA agenda and turn that vision of a healthier, more prosperous America into reality.”

RFK Jr.’s son Finn opened the MAHA Summit by laying out the staggering rise of chronic disease affecting mothers and children in America.

“Chronic illness makes your dreams feel impossible.”

“It separates you from your relationships and it mutes the colors of your life.”

“It… pic.twitter.com/QNlz8ihv3A

— MAHA Action (@MAHA_Action) November 17, 2025

 

Writing for the MAHA Report, attorney and farmer John Klar said the summit reflected “the extraordinary diversity of the growing MAHA movement.”

Klar, who attended the summit, told The Defender that the debate the summit sparked among MAHA’s grassroots supporters is unsurprising. He said:

“It seems like everything MAHA does is controversial, and the summit was no exception. I am skeptical of Big Tech, but I also see the potential benefits of increased efficiency in healthcare, SNAP benefits and food distribution.

“What excited me at the summit was seeing so many new faces involved in the movement, and the tent broadened to include multiple disciplines in medicine, government and tech. The priority remained preventive healthcare, focused on healthier diets. I found it hopeful.”

Alex Hardy, CEO of MAHA Holdings, said in a statement that the summit “proves how far and fast the MAHA coalition has grown.”

RFK Jr.: ‘Partnership with private industry’ crucial for achieving MAHA goals

The summit’s headline event was a 15-minute discussion between Kennedy and Vice President JD Vance. Vance praised Kennedy’s leadership of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the MAHA movement, saying that they have been “a critical part of our success in Washington.”

“Of all the specific initiatives that you guys have worked on effectively, the most important thing is that your team is willing to ask questions that people in government haven’t been asking in a long time,” Vance said. “We’ve got to be asking more critical questions about what we’re putting in the bodies of these kids.”

JD Vance says people like RFK Jr. were the ones who were right about Covid.

Not the experts.

“One of the criticisms that Bobby will always get and I always think is BS, is when people say, well, this or that conclusion is not supported by the science or this or that conclusion… pic.twitter.com/CJ9n91FUYh

— Children’s Health Defense (@ChildrensHD) November 13, 2025

 

“That’s what science is,” Kennedy said. “It’s recognizing that convention is often wrong and that the people who make advances on science, almost 100% of the time, are people who are willing to challenge orthodoxies and advance heterodoxies and talk about new ways of thinking.”

Kennedy said partnerships with industry are crucial for advancing MAHA’s agenda.

“A critical part of us achieving that goal is the partnership with private industry … entrepreneurs, the innovators who are trying to do the same thing,” he said.

Other speakers at the summit included Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; author and “Food Babe” Vani Hari; and key figures from Regeneron, CRISPR Therapeutics, Walmart, Google and Neuralink.

Critics: ‘MAHA is not MAHA anymore’

For Klar, the mix of speakers at the summit was cause for optimism about the momentum of the MAHA agenda.

Klar said he was pleased to see “federal agency heads excited about effecting real change in research, service delivery, prevention, food and patient focus” and “efforts to partner effectively with private industry for public good, instead of regulatory capture serving corporate profits at the expense of citizens’ health.”

But for other MAHA supporters, the presence of executives from pharmaceutical and technology firms raised red flags.

In an interview last week, Gray Delaney, a former HHS employee who, in that role, acted as a liaison between the agency and MAHA movement supporters, said the summit is evidence that “MAHA is not MAHA anymore.” He said the summit consisted of “a lot of industries, a lot about wearables and devices and AI [artificial intelligence] and all that.”

On Substack, Dr. Meryl Nass, founder of Door to Freedom, said she was “skeptical” of the discussions that took place at the summit. Noting the presence of “many tech bros” at the summit, she said its technology-centric agenda was “business as usual.”

“How will the NIH, for example, choose where to put its research dollars? Will the flashiest pitch win? … Where is the evidence that technology has improved lifespan (it hasn’t) or quality of life (when economically we are in worse shape)?” Nass asked.

“Tech and biotech have taken the wheel,” wrote Helena Bottemiller Evich in an article for FoodFix. “Just about every food advocate I talked to was struck by just how much the meeting was focused on tech and biotech solutions and startups.”

Evich said there were “a bunch of hot MAHA topics that were not addressed, including pesticides, soil health, infant formula, and even vaccines were left off the agenda,” and that “there was surprisingly little focus on the food system.” She said policy-related discussions took “a back seat.”

Sue Peters, Ph.D., a developmental neuroscientist and health freedom activist, praised the summit’s “wide net of inclusion” but was critical that some topics were excluded from its agenda, including the “apparent lack of attention to the need for individual freedom, choice, and control over personal data, and access to clear air, water and food, given the foundation of MAHA comes from health freedom.”

Peters said there was also a “lack of focus on root causes of disease” and the “role of the pandemic lockdowns, COVID-19 bioweapon and COVID-19 gene therapy on health in our country.” Instead, the focus was “placed on innovative solutions.”

According to Evich, the exclusion of these topics has riled the ranks of MAHA supporters. “The comments about all of this on X are a wild ride, with many supporters wondering how Kennedy could go along with such a move,” she wrote.

Critics also called out the potential financial incentives for participating corporations, including drugmakers. Evich cited a report by The Wall Street Journal earlier this month that the summit’s organizers sought between $250,000 and $1 million for sponsorships. The Defender was unable to independently confirm these figures by press time.

“Some attendees privately wondered which companies had sponsored the conference and whether it had skewed the agenda,” Evich wrote.

MAHA movement needs ‘every conceivable voice at the table’

In an interview on “The War Room” with Steve Bannon on Monday, Tony Lyons, president of MAHA Action, responded to the criticisms. He said hosting representatives from prominent pharmaceutical and tech firms isn’t a failure, but a sign of the MAHA movement’s success in the face of adversity.

Lyons told Bannon:

“We’re taking on some of the most powerful people on earth, and these are people who want to keep all of us sick. They make money by keeping us sick, and we want to help make people healthy.

“To get there, you need to have skepticism, you need to have curiosity, you need to question authority, and you’re not going to be able to do that and really make progress unless you’re willing to get every conceivable voice at the table.”

Dick Russell, author of 16 books, including “Real RFK Jr.: Trials of a Truth Warrior,” said discussions at the summit were “balanced and informative, especially the ones on food-as-medicine and the future role psychedelics can play for mental health.”

Discussions were “in line with MAHA’s goals and not overly dominated by corporate interests,” Russell said. “It was encouraging to learn of the growing interest from entrepreneurs in the vital changes to our public health system” that MAHA seeks.

Research scientist and author James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D., agreed. He told The MAHA Report there is “no way to conduct the business of HHS without considering the corporate stakeholders. The difference is that the consumers can be expected to be represented every step of the way, especially on safety.”

“If Walmart and other large corporations recognize that the winds are changing irrevocably and genuinely change course to provide healthy foods to citizens, that needs to be embraced and encouraged,” Klar said. “We needn’t compromise our mission standards to partner with some of these entities.”

Filmmaker Claire Dooley, a member of MAHA Action’s finance committee, told The Defender that the purpose of the summit “is not to have the MAHA grassroots movement joined with biotech,” but to “explore innovation” by bringing industry leaders to the table to “give their opinions on what needs to happen in healthcare.”

Dooley said she disagreed with many of the ideas and proposals that industry participants shared at the summit, but noted the significance of the MAHA movement sitting at the same table as pharma representatives.

“What we saw with the pharmaceutical industry was they chose who had a seat at the table and completely ostracized entire groups of people, and silenced them and entire industries,” Dooley said. The summit “was really kind of … stepping off on a new foot, where we’re saying, ‘Hey, we can meet with people that we don’t necessarily agree with or align with.’”

In an interview with Bannon, Dooley said that at a summit, “the most important thing doesn’t actually happen on stage, it happens in the conversations in the room.”

When asked if the grassroots movement is “in the room,” Dooley said, “Absolutely, they’re in the room.”

MAHA ‘a once-in-a-generation political gift to the GOP’

For Lyons, the main challenge the MAHA movement faces isn’t the presence of industry representatives at the same table — it’s the insufficient support the MAHA agenda has received from the Republican Party, with some of its key candidates ignoring MAHA altogether in this month’s elections.

In an op-ed last week for The Baltimore Sun, Lyons noted that MAHA-supporting voters and Kennedy’s support helped secure Trump’s electoral victory last year, describing MAHA as “a once-in-a-generation political gift to the GOP.”

Yet, “many Republicans in Congress have done little to show alignment with Secretary Kennedy” — and “some have actively distracted the secretary from his goals by selling out to Big Pharma and the processed food lobbies,” Lyons wrote.

In his interview with Bannon, Lyons suggested that Democrats may seek to exploit any lack of unity and cohesion, and the vocal criticisms of some grassroots MAHA activists, to attack Kennedy and Trump while wooing disaffected MAHA supporters during next year’s midterm congressional elections. He said:

“The idea is that the medical freedom movement or the MAHA movement, that we’re all fighting each other, but really that’s not by accident. These are people who we’re at war with, and they have such an incredible playbook, and they use every trick in the book, and they invent new tricks every day. What they’re doing now is they’re activating dissidents.

“They know that we’re fighters, that we’re questioning the status quo, that we always do that. So, they take people who disagree with Secretary Kennedy on one issue and they amplify the hell out of them, and they find people who criticize Bobby and they try to make it a much bigger story than it is.”

According to a report by Politico last week, Democrats plan to target Kennedy as their “boogeyman” during the midterms, while refraining from “litigating the MAHA movement, given the fairly broad appeal of its positions on food and wellness.”

Klar said both parties are walking a political tightrope in relation to MAHA. “Many Democrats favor MAHA’s policies for soil health, school lunches, small farms, etc., but they rebel at the MAHA acronym and refuse politically to permit this legislation to further these policies. Many Republicans seek to use the MAHA messaging, but balk at delivering on the vital policies needed to initiate real improvements.”

Klar said he “isn’t sure the president and some of those around him fully appreciate what an important populist surge is available here,” referring to MAHA’s supporters.

Watch the MAHA Summit here:

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https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/big-tech-big-pharma-join-maha-supporters-first-maha-summit/