Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, stood in the Oval Office and lauded President Trump’s new drug pricing deal for weight loss drugs.
“It is going to have dramatic effects on human health in this country,” Mr. Kennedy said, and thanked the “extraordinary C.E.O.s” of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, who were standing beside him.
It was a stark contrast to Mr. Kennedy’s history of bashing weight loss medications and pharmaceutical companies. Just a year ago, he claimed Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, was “counting on selling it to Americans because we are so stupid and so addicted to drugs.”
The president’s deals with Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly would lower prices and significantly expand coverage of the obesity drugs under Medicare and Medicaid. That would appear to run counter to Mr. Kennedy’s longstanding hostility toward the weight loss drugs, a view shared by some of his supporters. But neither he nor high-profile followers of the “Make America Healthy Again’’ movement would be likely to risk seeming disloyal to Mr. Trump.
As the nation’s top health official, Mr. Kennedy has been trying to navigate a balance between promoting the president’s goals and assuaging his supporters. He shifts between labeling weight loss medications as “miracle drugs” and renewing concerns about their safety.
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It was a sharp change in tone from October 2024, when Mr. Kennedy dismissed Ozempic as inferior to a healthy diet. “If we just gave good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight,” Mr. Kennedy said on Fox News.
His people are not happy:
“We shouldn’t be normalizing lifelong injections as a solution to the food environment that’s making people sick in the first place,” said Vani Hari, a Kennedy-allied influencer known as Food Babe and a prominent voice in the MAHA movement.
Alex Clark, the host of the popular Turning Point USA wellness podcast “Culture Apothecary,” said she was not enthused with Mr. Trump’s deal with the pharmaceutical companies. “But I understand why he’s doing it, and I understand why it’s being positioned as a MAHA standpoint,” she said.
Jillian Michaels, a fitness trainer who has become a vocal figure in the MAHA movement, said Mr. Kennedy had little leeway. “There’s no question that Kennedy’s wings have been clipped and he’s been brought to heel,” she said.
Bobby had to know that Trump didn’t give a damn about his “MAHA” policy. The man lives on Big Macs and diet coke and thinks exercise will sap and impurify his precious bodily fluids. It’s such a joke that the administration is pretending to believe in being “healthy,” especially after the right spent 8 years vilifying Michelle Obama for telling kids to eat their vegetables and go outside to play.
I can’t say I’m surprised that Bobby turns out to be a standard Trump whore. But it just goes to show that you don’t have to be a right winger to go there. Bobby spent his adult life railing against Big Pharma and now he’s going along with a drug that he and his followers have been hostile to for years.