MAHA’s Gone Viral. Can Science?

In some ways, Lauren Hughes is a classic “momfluencer”: She is a bubbly mother of three who sells mugs with slogans like “I need this FORKING coffee” and makes videos for her 548,000 followers about how she weaned her twins off pacifiers.

In other ways, she is not.

A pediatrician whose day job is running the medical practice she founded in Kansas City, Kansas, Hughes is offering something not often associated with social media’s health influencers: evidence-based information. Her Instagram account’s pinned post is a flowchart on how to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations on the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

“It’s a lot of just saying these things over and over and acknowledging that people have questions, which is a perfectly reasonable, normal response,” Hughes told NOTUS.

Hughes is part of a growing ecosystem of online influencers trying — and struggling — to counter Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement and its most misinformed and dangerous policy positions. This campaign now includes some familiar names from the Democratic party; Chelsea Clinton recently launched a podcast called “That Can’t Be True,” writing on X that it will “sort fact from fiction — especially on issues impacting our health.”

As Kennedy’s MAHA movement grows its cultural footprint, American public health professionals, medical practitioners and scientists are contending with an almost existential question: Can they compete against MAHA? Or are they too late?

The anti-MAHA message “needs to be said as aggressively as the people who are actually putting out the pseudoscience and the cherry picking,” said Demetre Daskalakis, the former director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, who quit after Kennedy pushed out CDC Director Susan Monarez.

Daskalakis has since regularly appeared on TV and in print news criticizing the administration’s public health policy. The call to action has put a magnifying glass on major public health institutions and created new demands — like going viral — on scientists and medical professionals that go beyond their traditional training.

Cautionary tales abound. Perhaps the most prominent health communicator of the past decade has no active online presence to speak of anymore. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became a household name — and the target of immense partisan vitriol — during the Covid-19 pandemic, to the point that one noted anti-vaccine activist wrote a book titled “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”

That activist, of course, was Kennedy.

A spokesperson said via email that Fauci, who is 84, is not currently taking interview requests.

Dr. Anthony Fauci faced accusations from Republicans that he mishandled the coronavirus response. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

It’s hard to quantify exactly how big the proportion of health- and science-related content on social media is misinformation. One 2022 review said it could be as high as 30%. A smaller study in 2024 looked at TikTok videos about a specific disease, sinusitis, and found that about half of them were made by nonmedical influencers; of those videos, over half contained inaccurate information.

A July KFF poll found that 55% of adults use social media to find health information and advice at least occasionally — and even more are served content about topics like weight loss and nutrition.

When KFF asked people for the names of specific influencers they turn to for health information, many of the answers were people associated with the MAHA movement: Dr. Eric Berg; Dr. Mehmet Oz; Dr. Phil.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s cuts to federal workers and programs, combined with some scientifically-dubious policy decisions from Kennedy, have eroded public trust in federal sources of public health information like the CDC.

In response, several state “health alliances” have sprung up, though their membership only includes Democratic-run states. Earlier this month, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy announced that they would begin publishing “public health alerts” as an explicit alternative to the long-running CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which, for the first time, has been paused during the government shutdown.

But these initiatives are generally meant for the scientific community, not the general public.

Leading U.S. medical societies like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have also increased the tempo of their outreach efforts. But they, too, have historically directed their messaging toward their health community members — and avoided wading into territory that could be seen as overtly political. That’s been a source of frustration for some science communicators.

“You’ve got these legacy organizations that have simply not thought it was that important to communicate with the public in a meaningful way,” said Colette Delawalla, president of the advocacy group Stand Up For Science. She gave the example of Research America, a nonprofit advocacy alliance with dozens of member organizations: It’s “supposed to be one of these top places and has like, 200 freaking followers on Instagram.” Research America did not respond to a request for comment.

Infectious disease epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera also pointed out that professional organizations tend to temper their messages.

“I hate to overuse this term, but we are really in unprecedented times,” Rivera said. “Groups like AAP and [American College of Physicians] and even institutions like [American Public Health Association], who’ve had to go out on a limb and use very direct language to combat what’s being said, is the least that they could be doing. I wish we could be doing more than that. And there are groups like AMA who aren’t doing enough.”

Several of the major medical associations are 501(c)(3)s or 501(c)(6)s, and limited in the types of overtly political statements they can make.

“Any of these organizations — and I know this because I’ve done it — on Jan. 21, 2025, could have stood up, in less than 24 hours, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit arm of what they’re already doing, and granted over some money, set up a little team, and gotten political,” Delawalla said. “The American Cancer Society has a whole [501(c)(4)] arm where they work really hard on lobbying, and it’s the reason why the National Cancer Institute exists.”

The AAP, which does not have an affiliated 501(c)(4) and says in its FAQs that it spends a “minimal amount” on lobbying, didn’t respond to a request for comment from NOTUS. Neither did the AMA, which does spend heavily on lobbying but generally keeps its publicly facing communications politically neutral; the organization’s website is also tailored to health professionals, not the public.

In an email, an ACP spokesperson, Angela Collom, said, “Since the COVID-19 pandemic, ACP has worked to actively counter medical misinformation online,” pointing to the organization’s YouTube channel, “mis- and disinformation hub” that provides members resources to use with patients and the organizations “several public statements and press releases condemning false claims about vaccines and other health issues.”

Susan Polan, associate executive director of the APHA, told NOTUS that the organization has been “actively trying” to find new ways to reach the public, supporting members with shareable information and hosting influencers at their annual meeting.

“The truth is, in a perfect world, we would have billions of dollars to be able to do those large media campaigns and social media campaigns and all of the things to try and create a bully pulpit that is as loud as the bully pulpit that the secretary has,” Polan said. “But obviously that’s not within our capacity, and so we’ve been using the tools that are available to us to get information out as widely and broadly as we can.”

Protesters gather during a “Rally for Science,” against cuts to science and research funding outside the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC, on Friday, March 7, 2025. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the Trump Administration have severely cut funding for disease and biomedical research amidst emerging threats to public health. (Photo by Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images) Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA via AP

Without that infrastructure in place, combating Kennedy has fallen on homegrown science communicators like Hughes and Rivera.

Mikhail “Doctor Mike” Varshavski, a family physician with an immensely popular YouTube channel, said during an appearance at a health conference last month that because scientists and medical providers haven’t historically been pushed to take their message to social media, that created a “gap” that was then “filled by grifters, by snakeoil people, people selling all sorts of miracle cures.”

“In my personal opinion, experts such as physicians, scientists, nurses, people in health care in general, in the sciences, those with credible expertise, need to step up to try to explain to people what’s really going on,” Zachary Rubin, a pediatric allergist and clinical immunologist with over a million followers on Instagram, told NOTUS.

But even between this community of like-minded influencers, there’s no consensus on how to break MAHA’s hold on social media. Those like Delawalla and Shaughnessy Naughton, president of 314 Action, a PAC that’s trying to get more scientists and medical providers elected to office, say communicators should call out MAHA’s misinformation, and point out hypocrisies, head on.

“‘Make America Healthy Again,’ but we’re ending SNAP benefits?” was how Delawalla put it, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

But others say that approach can risk alienating people who see the MAHA movement as an important voice for under-addressed issues. Caitlin Dow, a senior nutrition scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told NOTUS that she thinks it’s important to focus on the content of the message, not the messenger.

“I think of my audience when I’m writing these articles — I’ve dubbed them the ‘curious and confused,’” Dow said, adding that her goal is “writing and communicating in such a way that doesn’t suggest that anybody who would believe this claim is a fool, and not trying to poke fun at a belief.”

That kind of brute force counter-posting has its fans — Rubin said that he often tries to “get ahead” of misinformation by debunking misleading claims directly — but some science communicators disagree with this strategy because of concerns that platforming misinformation can help it spread.

Plus, it’s just a ton of work. None of this is as simple as just forcing every medical student and STEM Ph.D. in the country to create a TikTok account in order to graduate. “It’s mostly unpaid labor,” Rivera said.

And publicly talking about health is “scary,” she said.

“I’ve had death threats and wishes of harm on me and my children,” Rivera said. “I had the FBI call me one week saying that my name and my children’s names had shown up on dark websites.”

They face many of the same challenges politicians are grappling with. And they’re tasked with developing many of the same qualities that make politicians successful.

“They like to see people communicating on a casual, relational level. That’s the definition of meeting people where they are at,” Lucky Tran, a science communicator based in New York, told NOTUS.

It’s a strategy that the MAHA movement is familiar with — many of its high-profile advocates sport their own social media platforms, like Vani Hari, aka the “Food Babe” (2.3 million Instagram followers), and the administration’s nominee for Surgeon General, wellness author Casey Means (850,000 Instagram followers).

The overlap is so apparent that this political and public health environment is pushing some doctors to run for office. Pediatrician-turned-communicator-turned-candidate, Annie Andrews, told NOTUS that voters have told her they feel like they “already know her” thanks to her social media presence.

Andrews is running a long-shot bid to unseat Sen. Lindsey Graham, and has been supported by 314 Action.

“This is not a path I ever envisioned for myself. I was perfectly happy in my role as a pediatrician,” Andrews said. “We all just have to be brave, point the camera at our face, and start talking.”