As a nature-loving physical therapist in Boulder, Colorado, Colin O’Banion shops at farmers markets, grows organic squash in his backyard and thought he could never vote for Donald Trump.

But during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, he and his wife became social outcasts when they refused vaccines for themselves and their three sons. Tuning in to alternative health podcasts, O’Banion became convinced that the country’s public health establishment was corrupt, and that the only antidote was the upheaval being promised by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as he teamed up with Trump.

“That’s what brought me on board,” O’Banion, 49, said, still sounding surprised that he had voted for Trump, now the president-elect. “We have a real epidemic going on with metabolic disease, diabetes, obesity. How is it possible we have so much money and the most unhealthy people?”

Scientists and public health experts have expressed alarm that Trump wants to give over the country’s health agencies to people like Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who have spread misinformation about vaccines and COVID treatments and vowed to gut the government agencies that regulate food and medicines.

But to people like O’Banion, rejecting norms is exactly the point.

Kennedy Pledges to “Make America Healthy Again”

Trust in scientists and medical experts has eroded since the pandemic, and voters galvanized by Kennedy’s pledge to “Make America Healthy Again” as head of the Department of Health and Human Services said he had given voice to their frustrations with the whole system — from vaccines and COVID rules to hospitals and health insurance.

“I see that man as someone who understands what’s happening and who is trying to help,” said Savannah Fisher, 36, a resident of St. Augustine, Florida, who said she turned to alternative treatments for chronic pain after feeling dismissed by medical doctors.

Years before the pandemic battles over vaccine mandates, school closures and mask rules turned public health into a partisan minefield, Americans struggled with worsening health outcomes, even as many were plagued by medical debt.

“You have a large swath of the population facing a health crisis, and they feel like medicine and public health isn’t delivering,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, who served as President Joe Biden’s COVID response coordinator. “They’re much more open to people saying, ‘The whole system is corrupt and we have to blow the whole thing up.’”

According to public surveys by the Pew Research Center, nearly 8 in 10 Americans still say they believe that scientists act in the public interest — a far higher level of trust than people give to politicians or the news media. Yet many Americans no longer have lasting relationships with primary care doctors, and social media influencers, often with little or no medical training, have rushed to fill the void.

A CBS poll found some early support for Kennedy’s nomination to run the federal health department, with 47% of voters saying he was a good pick and 34% opposing him. (Both he and Oz, whom Trump nominated to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, are subject to Senate confirmation.)

Many of Kennedy’s fans make for unlikely allies: small-government conservatives who opposed COVID lockdowns, for example, and liberals sympathetic to Kennedy’s attacks on drugmakers and factory farms.

Even Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, praised Kennedy’s nomination, though he quickly clarified his position to say he disagrees with Kennedy’s opinions about vaccines after a backlash from public health experts in his state.

Kennedy Shares Voters Grievances About Health Care

In nearly two dozen interviews, voters supportive of Trump’s “MAHA” agenda — including many who have voted Democratic in the past — said they like Kennedy because he shares their grievances about health care and their interest in alternative medicines and natural remedies.

In Austin, Texas, Michelle High, 54, said she began questioning the medical establishment after an oncologist told her there was nothing she could do to improve her odds of surviving colon cancer.

High began seeing a naturopath and made nutritional changes to supplement her treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. After reading more about holistic health, she came to believe that the medical establishment was ignoring what seemed to her an obvious connection between the American food system and chronic disease. Although government agencies have studied and sought to raise awareness about that link, many critics like High say it’s not nearly enough.

“Our government is just like, ‘Nope,’” she said. “That feels dirty, and that’s where you get all the conspiracy theories — when you feel like they’re lying to you, and gaslighting you, telling you: ‘There’s nothing. Don’t look there.’”

High said she trusts her doctors, but she has stopped discussing her alternative treatments with them.

“They just make you feel small,” she said.

In the Atlanta suburbs, Melinda Hicks, 55, is a lifelong Democrat who voted for Trump in November thanks to Kennedy’s endorsement of him. Watching her father undergo painful and ultimately ineffective treatments for colon cancer soured her on Western medicine, she said, and she turned to naturopathic doctors and acupuncturists to address her family’s health issues.

She had long wanted Democrats to offer a different approach on health policy but kept voting for them because she saw them as her party. Until last month. While Kamala Harris championed abortion rights, birth control and the Affordable Care Act, Hicks felt that the vice president and other Democrats should have focused more on the country’s broader health problems.

“How do you look around at how sick people are and not say, ‘Well, I may not agree with Bobby Kennedy, but he’s right, we’ve got a real problem here’?” she asked.

Hicks said her family spends thousands of dollars a year on alternative treatments that are not covered by their insurance, which they rarely use. She hopes that Kennedy might be able to expand the types of services covered; insurance companies typically limit coverage to treatments that have been proven effective for a certain condition.

What’s unclear is whether Kennedy, a former Democrat and environmental lawyer, will make good on his vows to go after heavily processed foods, seed oils, food dyes, corporate farmers and drugmakers as part of a second Trump administration that is also promising to cut regulations. In his first term, Trump loosened nutrition rules for school lunches and approved scores of products containing pesticides.

Public Health Officials Warn Against Trump’s Agenda

Public health officials are already warning that Trump’s agenda could endanger Americans if scientists are purged from federal agencies and health decisions are made by political appointees who reject expert advice.

And some researchers say that Kennedy’s emphasis on toxins and the food supply overlooks Americans’ top concern about health care: its cost.

“Obesity, better food, those things don’t come up” in polling about health care issues, said Mollyann Brodie, executive director of KFF’s Public Opinion and Survey Research Program.

Kennedy’s advocacy for healthy eating and exercise is hardly unique — health experts and bipartisan administrations have championed them for decades. But some people are skeptical of his proposals, such as giving Americans three organic meals a day in place of weight-loss drugs.

“He’s got some valid points,” said Julie Conklin, 67, of Healdsburg, California. “But then he bases things so much on what I would view as junk science.”

Some Democratic voters said that they worry more about Republicans in Congress repealing the Affordable Care Act than Kennedy’s promotion of raw milk or opposition to water fluoridation.

Myron Randles, 62, a supervisor at a building materials company in Riverside, California, said he believes there are two tiers in the American health care system: One for the “ultra wealthy” and the other for the “regular, everyday people.” He said he does not trust Trump, noting his suggestion early in the pandemic that injecting a disinfectant might cure COVID-19, or Oz, whom Randles dismissed as a TV huckster, to make health policy decisions.

“I am sorry, I don’t have faith,” he said. “I need a doctor that will actually prescribe things that will help.”

But in New Jersey, Cindy James, 59, who left a job as a corporate lawyer to become a spiritual counselor, said Kennedy’s rise showed that Americans had hit a “cumulative breaking point” when it came to accepting public health guidelines.

She said she had felt shamed by friends, politicians and the news media for refusing to get a COVID vaccination. With Trump returning to the White House, she said, she felt vindicated.

“People across the country are waking up from being told how to think and what to do,” she said, “especially about what we put in our bodies, what we breathe, and what’s in our water.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Jack Healy, Isabelle Taft and Kate Selig/Jamie Kelter Davis
c. 2024 The New York Times Company