Chelsea Cirruzzo and Daniel Payne , 2025-11-12 22:27:00
WASHINGTON — Vice President JD Vance lauded the Make America Healthy Again movement as an “incredible part” of the Trump administration’s success at a mostly closed-door event at the glitzy Waldorf Astoria on Wednesday.
Dubbed the “Official MAHA Summit,” top federal health officials and health industry execs gathered to talk about psychedelics, food as medicine, and how to reverse aging. Vance’s conversation with health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was broadcast, but the rest of the event took place in secret — one planner described it as “hush-hush.”
The night before, MAHA VIPs — among them Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, and Ultimate Human podcast host Gary Brecka — mingled with Kennedy at a party in the hotel lobby. The next day, attendees included Dennis Kucinich, the former Democratic lawmaker who was briefly Kennedy’s presidential campaign manager.
Between sessions and during lunch, attendees milled around the lobby, under high glass ceilings and glistening chandeliers: Regenerative farmers had coffee at the sleek hotel bar and wellness influencers shook hands and unpacked swag bags. At one point, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary strolled through, with some attendees stopping to say hello.
It was a strange mix of bedfellows: Biotech executives, including Regeneron co-founder and science chief George Yancopoulos and CRISPR Therapeutics CEO Sam Kulkarni alongside conservative wellness influencers like Brecka and actor Russell Brand.
The addition of the vice president, as well as Kennedy and deputies like Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicare and Medicaid; Jay Bhattacharya, who directs the National Institutes of Health; and Makary gave the event the Official Washington stamp of approval. Thanks to the presence of top administration officials, attendees waited hours in a winding line outside the hotel to be screened by the Secret Service.
The daylong meeting was seen by those in the room and those intimately familiar with the MAHA movement as an important melding of interests that need to get along for Kennedy’s agenda to succeed. They include leaders of biotech firms who may be skeptical of Kennedy’s agenda, Trump’s MAGA base, and Kennedy’s MAHA coalition.
The summit offered a unique opportunity for private sector leaders to get face time with powerful government officials, potentially creating relationships or sparking ideas that could become central to future policymaking — and potentially lucrative for companies. Hundreds of people across government, the health care industry, venture capital, and MAHA groups were in attendance, two of the people in the room said.
The gathering was closed to the press and HHS spokespeople referred STAT to organizers for questions. The event organizer did not respond to a list of questions from STAT about who received invites and which groups sponsored the event.
By midday, Kennedy showed up to moderate a fireside chat with Vance. The vice president adopted Kennedy’s signature skepticism of traditionally accepted public health interventions. His appearance, attendees said, was interpreted as a clear signal of the importance of the MAHA movement to the future of the Republican coalition — and the importance of the Trump administration to accomplishing MAHA’s goals.
“I don’t like taking medications,” Vance said, mentioning an aversion to ibuprofen.
“I don’t like taking anything unless I absolutely have to. And I think that is another MAHA-style attitude. It’s not anti-medication, it’s anti-useless-medication,” he continued.
Vance suggested he was right at home in the movement: his wife, Usha, has long focused on feeding their children healthy foods. Even if she wouldn’t necessarily claim that identity for herself, she was in reality an original MAHA person, the vice president said.
Inside the room, a unique opportunity
Inside, attendees were given swag bags loaded with MAHA-friendly goodies: Creatine by Momentous, Vandy potato crisps — which are cooked in beef tallow — and a copy of “The Real RFK Jr.: Trials of a Truth Warrior,” by Dick Russell and published by Skyhorse, which was founded by Tony Lyons, the leader of MAHA Action.
But the panels remained largely uncontroversial, one person in the room told STAT partway through the summit. Officials emphasized their work prioritizing primary care and expanding access to GLP-1s. Oz told attendees that GLP-1 pills would be coming in March, according to the person. (The Trump administration announced earlier this month that oral versions of the weight loss drugs — which it pledged to review for approval much faster than usual — would cost $150 through the direct-to-consumer TrumpRx platform.)
Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, reassured the audience that the federal government would remain a key player in funding crucial research, according to one of the people in the room who spoke to STAT on the condition of anonymity — comments that came after months of major research funding cuts from the administration.
The topic of vaccines, one of MAHA’s core issues and perhaps one of its most divisive, wasn’t a major focus, people in attendance said. Despite the movement’s longstanding skepticism toward medical interventions broadly, some in the audience cheered after a session that included discussions of Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which produces a brain-computer interface, one person in attendance said.
One of the people in the room noted how “striking” it was to be able to fraternize with key government leaders, who they said were “shockingly open to our ideas.”
Vance, too, appeared open to the ideas of those in attendance — especially those at the forefront of the MAHA movement.
“So many of the things that are happening on the public health side are bullshit,” he said. “There’s this attack where people say, ‘Well, you know this or that conclusion is not supported by the science. This or that conclusion is a conspiracy.’ And science, as practiced in its best form, is that if you disagree with it, then you ought to criticize it.”
Allison DeAngelis contributed reporting
