When guests arrived at the Make America Healthy Again Inaugural Ball on the night of Jan. 20, they could rest assured they were entering a refuge: The event’s self-described “exclusive media coverage partner,” Biohack Yourself Media, told them so.
“This is a safe media space, designed to reflect everything the MAHA movement stands for — truth, transparency, and positivity,” read the interview invitation Biohack Yourself issued to ball attendees. “We are not mainstream media. We are an independent, friendly health press, aligned with the principles of this movement.”
Hand-picking preferred media is certainly not new for politicians, but crackdowns on who gets to cover what have reached a new high under President Donald Trump. The Associated Press continues to be denied access to the Oval Office over its refusal to use the Trump-mandated moniker “Gulf of America.” ABC settled a defamation lawsuit to avoid facing the president’s wrath. NBC News, The New York Times, NPR and Politico were kicked out of their Pentagon workspaces to make room for four new outlets, three of which lean right.
Biohack Yourself’s partnership with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 501(c)(4), MAHA Action, models a new approach for news organizations hoping to get — and keep — access to the new administration’s leadership. Biohack Yourself’s editor in chief, TereZa Lolli, and a spokesperson for MAHA Action, Emma Post, both emphasized in emails that Biohack Yourself was not the only outlet present at the MAHA ball. But other journalists were asked to leave at 7, according to Vogue’s coverage of the event. Biohack Yourself’s interviews went on until after 9:30 p.m. Post did not respond when asked about the different levels of access for different outlets.
Biohack Yourself also produced the ball, which was attended by many of Trump’s nominees for leadership roles at the health agencies. Even Dave Weldon, the elusive former nominee for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did a Biohack Yourself interview at the MAHA ball — the only on-camera appearance he made between when he received the nomination and when the White House rescinded it, Weldon confirmed to NOTUS in an email. He declined to provide any other comment.
“What we wanted to do was create an environment that was safe for the attendees of the ball so that they felt that they weren’t going to be attacked,” said Anthony Lolli, who owns Biohack Yourself alongside his wife, TereZa Lolli.
The Biohack Yourself website has had “millions” of visitors, according to an overview document provided by the Lollis, and TereZa Lolli added in an email that its Instagram account is approaching 6 million engagements per month. The MAHA ball “further cemented Biohack Yourself’s name as People’s Choice for Health Media,” the overview document proclaimed.
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As a rule, Kennedy does not talk to reporters. I spent the weeks leading up to Kennedy’s confirmation hearings following him around Capitol Hill, begging for scraps of whatever he’d discussed with senators when he met with them to gauge and grow support for his nomination for Health and Human Services secretary. Sometimes I was the only reporter remaining at the end of the day. One quiet afternoon, I asked Kennedy if any of the conversations he’d had with senators stood out.
“They’re private conversations,” he told me, and left. (Kennedy also didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.) But many of the senators he spoke with later posted photos accompanied by praise about their conversations with the then-nominee on X — conversations that, according to their posts, seemed to only briefly touch on Kennedy’s political kryptonite, vaccines.
“We had a productive discussion on rural health challenges, combatting the chronic disease epidemic, and protecting patients from one-size-fits-all government mandates,” wrote Sen. John Barrasso.
For Kennedy, having a tight grasp on media access hasn’t been just about favoring sympathetic outlets. It’s also part of his plan to create a new Kennedy.
“News reports complain that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry,” Kennedy told senators during his first hearing. “I am neither.”
Kennedy has maintained this disciplined approach to engaging with the media since getting confirmed, giving limited interviews to Fox News and restricting public comment on HHS decisions. An op-ed he wrote about the ongoing measles outbreak was careful to not not recommend vaccines, but also not deter people from exploring alternative (and less effective) treatment options like vitamin A.
The result of this strategy is that Kennedy has maintained just enough plausible deniability to keep some distance from the uproar surrounding HHS’s policy shifts while still placating fans of his prior anti-vaccine, science-skeptical work. It’s the will-he-or-won’t-he approach to public health messaging.
Inviting a lone, agreeable outlet to enjoy special access to an event like the MAHA ball doesn’t just insulate Kennedy and his cohort from pointed questions about what’s actually going on inside their heads. It also just generally aligns with the new administration’s approach to media coverage so far, said Matthew Baum, a professor of communications and public policy at Harvard University.
“They are trying to increasingly privilege what they perceive as friendly media, and if not remove entirely, at least lower the access of the traditional media that they perceive as biased against them,” Baum said.
In an email, TereZa Lolli said, “The [MAHA ball] was celebratory and our coverage was similar to how ‘E-News,’ ‘Extra’ or ‘Access Hollywood’ cover a red carpet celebration event with light-hearted questions.”
Biohack Yourself’s interview invitation promised ball attendees that this would be their “time to shine” through “positive, forward-facing interviews” with “trusted interviewers.”
It continued: “Tone: Friendly, light, and empowering.”
Anthony and TereZa Lolli took a circuitous route to becoming health media moguls. Anthony made his fortune in Brooklyn real estate in the mid-2000s — his company gave raises to employees who got tattooed with the business’s logo — and he served as adviser to the Brooklyn borough president at the time, Eric Adams.
Anthony was overweight when he met TereZa, a former actress, and she encouraged him to get in shape, they said. They filmed Anthony’s fitness journey and in 2020 released From Fat Lolli To 6 Pack Lolli on Amazon. (Both of the Lollis later became professional bodybuilders.)
“Once we did that documentary, that kind of opened up the doors,” Anthony Lolli said when we spoke via video call this month. He and TereZa appeared together, sharing a pair of wired headphones, and when I asked them to tell me how they got into health communications, they took turns finishing each other’s sentences for 20 uninterrupted minutes.
Biohack Yourself Media began as another documentary, a five-part series featuring a large cast of alternative health characters, including Kennedy. But as promotional content for the documentary grew to include videos and articles about the film’s cast, something unusual happened, the Lollis said.
“We started getting notable figures that weren’t in the film saying, ‘Hey, I want to contribute content,’” Anthony Lolli said. They started inviting academics and “regular folks that are very, very well-versed in longevity” to contribute to the site.
Biohack Yourself Media now produces articles, podcasts and events about how to live as long as possible. But the company’s mission, the website states, also includes “eradicating information pollution, misinformation, malinformation and propaganda.”
Del Bigtree, CEO of MAHA Action and former communications director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, personally asked the Lollis to produce the MAHA ball after attending the premiere of another of the couple’s documentaries, Anthony Lolli said in a February podcast episode.
“Bobby and the team said, ‘We need that kind of energy at the MAHA ball because these people are on the front lines. These people are the voices of MAHA,’” Anthony Lolli said. “Our reporters are actually health advocates… So when they’re asking questions, when they’re interviewing, they’re not just some journalists with an agenda.”
Bigtree didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Ana-Maria Temple, a pediatrician who specializes in holistic treatments for eczema, reported from the MAHA ball for Biohack Yourself. She told NOTUS she was “really impressed” by the attendees.
“I interviewed a ton of cardiologists, which I wasn’t expecting, and they were so pro lifestyle changes and less medications and changing America’s healthcare,” Temple said. “It was really great to be in a room where everyone’s mission was wellness with less meds.”
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At Kennedy’s first Senate hearing, Calley Means, a friend of Kennedy’s, took a photo of an article on a reporter’s computer screen and posted it on X with the caption, “Astounding. Reporters at RFK hearing have pre-written negative headlines.” (The article wasn’t a pre-write — it had already been published hours before the hearing — and its headline didn’t pass any specific judgement on Kennedy. Means didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
“One cannot hate the legacy media enough,” replied Richard Ebright, a microbiology professor with ties to Kennedy. “They have no shame.”
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when it would have been considered a win by the “health freedom” movement for a mainstream media outlet to unironically report on anything Kennedy did. But his rise to institutional power has made him, like other formerly fringe figures, less reliant than ever on the visibility that comes with coverage from the mainstream press. Now, members of the Trump administration across government are choosing to elevate sympathetic non-mainstream press with whom they have preexisting relationships rather than work with the existing media.
When the Trump administration in February released a batch of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, rather than immediately send the files to media outlets, Attorney General Pam Bondi gave binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a handful of right-wing influencers, who posed for pictures by legacy press photographers as they left the West Wing.
“The looks on their faces, so sour, so dour, so astonished to see us,” was how one influencer, Liz Wheeler, recalled the press gaggle’s reaction on a podcast. “We were kind of laughing at that. We were holding up these binders in defiance, saying, ‘You know what? You’ve been relegated to the bushes because you lie, and you smear, and you gaslight the American people. We are the media now.’”
Wheeler didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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When I asked the Lollis where they see Biohack Yourself Media fitting into the media landscape, Anthony Lolli said they can fill a unique niche.
“We’re like where super science meets Hollywood,” he said. “It’s a little bit more simplified, and it’s all about resonating with the right audience that can understand it and wants to consume something in a certain way.”
Biohack Yourself’s news coverage “reflects information as it is, without political bias or leaning,” TereZa Lolli said in an email. But some of the outlet’s articles are written in an exaggerated style — “Imagine incorporating the same beauty serum that Cleopatra used into your daily routine,” reads one article about the benefits of black seed oil — with promises to help readers live longer, healthier lives. (TereZa’s email also stated that they “always encourage people to refer to our terms and conditions, which clearly state that the content on our site is for informational and entertainment purposes only.”)
Sensational language, unverifiable sources and a clear financial incentive are three red flags that signal misinformation, said Irving Washington, executive director of the Health Information and Trust Initiative at KFF. TereZa Lolli said over email that they “agree that information should be grounded in evidence and backed by science.”
With long-trusted government health agencies becoming less reliable, misinformation has never been more critical — or challenging — to identify, Washington said.
“A lot of people are just stuck in the middle where they don’t know what to believe,” he added, citing a January KFF poll that found that while most adults trust the health agencies at least a “fair amount,” fewer than one in four trust them “a great deal.”
TereZa Lolli said in an email that Biohack Yourself tries to cite relevant scientific studies and sources, but they “recognize that even peer-reviewed research can eventually be challenged or debunked.” She cited four studies from the 1990s and early 2000s as examples of scientific research that had been later found to be difficult to reproduce or not in line with later studies. (Biohack Yourself uses its own longevity-focused “peer review faculty” to vet the products and companies the website highlights, the Lollis said in an interview.)
“While we value scientific evidence, we don’t believe it’s the only measure of what may or may not be effective,” TereZa said via email. “Our goal is to present information transparently and empower our audience to think critically, do their own research, and make informed decisions that work best for their health journey.”
The Lollis also denied that Biohack Yourself has any particular bias.
“I don’t think, for us, health is political,” TereZa Lolli said during our video conversation. “We’re there supporting the people that want transparency and truth and real engagement from the regular person.”
Videos and photos from the MAHA ball are available on the Biohack Yourself website for attendees to share — with a few caveats to maintain “integrity and context,” TereZa Lolli explained by email.
“While BioHack Yourself Media owns the footage, it remains regulated by MAHA,” reads a disclaimer. “These assets may not be used in any way that misrepresents, defames, or causes harm to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.