MAHA Movement Challenges Public Health Orthodoxy, Takes ‘Bulldozer to Overton Windows,’ Vance Says

Public health in America can only advance if there’s a willingness to challenge orthodoxy, Vice President JD Vance said at a “Make America Healthy Again” event Wednesday.

“There is no way that this country is going to advance unless we’re comfortable with people who are willing to challenge orthodoxy,” Vance said. “And that’s what I think got so broken, not just about the scientific bureaucracy, but probably it’s it was worse in the scientific area than in most other places, is we’ve got to be comfortable challenging some of these old orthodoxies.”

“Part of that is welcoming people who are a little unusual because unless you do that, like you’re not going to solve America’s problems with Mackenzie consultants who say everything the right way all the time,” he continued.

Vance and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. discussed the Trump administration’s approach to public health at the MAHA Summit in the District of Columbia.

Vance praised Trump for taking a “bulldozer to Overton windows.”

“One of the interesting things about working with this president is that, we’re coming into these bureaucracies that have constructed these orthodoxies, and it’s just a series of very narrow Overton windows. You’re not allowed to bring the conversation out or you get destroyed,” Kennedy said.

The bulldozing of orthodoxy “had to happen,” Vance said.

“If you look at so many of the things that are happening on the public health side, one of the criticisms that Bobby will always get,” Vance said, “and I always think it’s such b–t…is sometimes there’s this attack where people will say well his or that conclusion is not supported by the science or this or that conclusion is a conspiracy theory.”

“Science as practiced in its best form is that if you disagree with it, then you ought to criticize it and you ought to argue it against it but you can’t shutdown the debate,” he said.

According to Vance, in many of the public health debates over the last few decades have started, people who say things outside the Overton window have been silenced.

“As we found out the hard way over the last few years, it was very often the people who were outside the Overton window who were actually right and all the experts were wrong,” he said.

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

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