Former MAHA moms who once championed RFK Jr.’s anti-establishment health crusade are now sounding the alarm, saying they feel guilty for helping turbocharge a movement they believe is putting kids at risk. Their reversals, first reported by Raw Story, land as vaccine skepticism climbs and measles makes an ugly comeback across the U.S., a trend public health experts tie to the Kennedy-branded “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
Heather Simpson says her journey into the rabbit hole started innocently enough, when she was researching how to boost her chances of pregnancy and got hooked on the docuseries, The Truth About Vaccines, that featured Kennedy and other vaccine skeptics. The name Kennedy carried pedigree, Simpson admits, and before long she had become an anti-vax influencer who once dressed up as “measles” for Halloween, making light of a disease that can be deadly.
Years later, after COVID and a series of conversations with scientists, Simpson began dismantling the myths she once repeated, then co-founded Back to the Vax to help other parents pull themselves out of the rabbit hole of misinformation
Her partner in that project, Canadian mom and nurse Lydia Greene, calls herself a “crunchy apostate.” She describes spiraling into an all-natural, anti-medicine mindset that, by her account, made her family less safe and her health worse. Greene says MAHA repackaged old wellness fads, from raw milk to fringe “detoxes,” in a slick political wrapper, and that social media did the rest, blasting the talking points into Facebook groups and TikTok feeds where anxious parents scroll at 2 a.m.
Raw Story reports that both women now field messages every week from parents on the fence about childhood shots, but they fear the tide is moving the other way. The trend overlaps with Kennedy’s ascent to Health and Human Services, where his playbook has included elevating vaccine skeptics to advisory posts and cutting vaccine research dollars, moves that experts say send a green light to vaccine skepticism. The MAHA moms’ mea culpa arrives as measles cases hit their highest levels since 2000, a gut-check that punctures the notion that herd immunity will carry us no matter how many opt out.
Kennedy’s culture-war health brand has been building for years, from Children’s Health Defense to the MAHA rollout and even a raw-milk photo-op that drew criticism from mainstream epidemiologists. Supporters frame it as freedom and food purity, critics as pseudoscience with a populist gloss. Whatever the label, the momfluencer pipeline is real, with “MAHA moms” pushing Kennedy’s messages into private chats and school-yard circles that public health agencies struggle to reach.
The moms who flipped say what ultimately changed their minds was biology, not politics. Simpson describes talking with specialists about claims that emulsifiers or aluminum punch holes in the blood-brain barrier, then watching those theories crumble under basic cellular science. Greene says outbreaks close to home, along with the grim math of who gets hurt when vaccination rates drop, snapped her out of it. Their advice to the vaccine-hesitant is simple, and pointed at MAHA’s top messenger, check the data, not the chatter on social media.
