November 24, 2025
4 min read
Psychedelics and Immortality Take Center Stage at MAHA Summit
The Make America Healthy Again summit, attended by RFK, Jr., and J.D. Vance, gave a sense of what’s driving U.S. health policy
Vice President J.D. Vance (right) and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (left) participate in a discussion during a MAHA Summit at Waldorf Astoria Hotel on November 12, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
Social-media influencers and anti-ageing entrepreneurs mingled with top US government officials, including the head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), at an exclusive event steps from the White House this month. The meeting’s purpose was to discuss the future of health in the United States.
Organizers called it the MAHA Summit, referring to US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s signature ‘Make America Healthy Again’ movement. Attendees included Kennedy, US vice-president JD Vance, NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya, US Food and Drug Administration chief Marty Makary and the food activist Vani Hari, who blogs under the name Food Babe. Sessions at the summit, which Nature attended, covered a wide range of health-related topics, including psychedelics, brain implants and anti-ageing therapies. Academic researchers and clinicians were not among the speakers at the sessions, which were peppered by comments critical of the medical establishment.
The conference showcased the influence of the MAHA movement, whose supporters say there is a chronic-disease epidemic in the United States that they blame in part on corruption in the food and pharmaceutical industries. To combat this epidemic, supporters advocate lifestyle choices, such as improving sleep and taking dietary supplements.
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The movement has ascended rapidly from a loose network of Kennedy supporters into a political force that Vance, speaking at the summit, called “a critical part of our success in Washington”. The event also drew officials from corporate heavyweights, such as Walmart and Google, and biotechnology firms, such as Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, New York.
“We didn’t have anything like this,” Robert Redfield, who led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2018 to 2021, during US President Donald Trump’s first term, told Nature at the summit. “Bobby [Kennedy] has gotten industry to sit down with him.”
Warm praise
The nearly eight-hour summit featured remarks by several officials in Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services. Among them was Bhattacharya, who said that the “MAHA movement is an absolutely incredible thing to me”. He added: “I have waited my entire life to see this movement come.”
Other speakers included mixed-martial-arts promoter Dana White and actor and comedian Russell Brand. Attendees also heard health advice from Bryan Johnson, a Silicon Valley multimillionaire known for his anti-ageing ‘biohacks’, such as receiving plasma transfusions from his teenage son, and his view that his generation might be first to never die.
Throughout the event, speakers criticized established scientific and medical institutions. Both are frequent targets of Kennedy, who founded Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit organization in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, that is known for its anti-vaccine advocacy. One of these speakers was Bhattacharya, who said that the NIH, the world’s largest biomedical-research funder, has focused too heavily on small scientific steps instead of “disruptive” or “innovative” research.
“What puts lives at risk is doing research that’s incremental,” Bhattacharya said. “All it does is advance the careers of the researchers that do it. It results in publications that don’t get used and aren’t replicable.”
Follow the science
Makary decried “groupthink that again and again led us astray”, citing as an example public-health recommendations against eating saturated fat. (Kennedy has suggested that saturated fats are part of a healthy diet; the US government has, for decades, recommended limiting saturated-fat consumption.) “We got ‘saturated fat causes heart disease’ wrong for 50 years,” Makary said. “That’s a war we’re going to end.”
Vance also took aim at the medical establishment in remarks that seemed to allude to the public-health response during the COVID-19 pandemic. “As we found out the hard way over the last few years,” very often people outside the scientific mainstream “were right and all the experts were wrong”, he said, to loud cheers from the audience.
At a panel discussion about using psychedelics as medical treatments, investor Christian Angermayer urged attendees to “follow the science” about the drugs — eliciting audible groans from several audience members. Angermayer, founder of atai Life Sciences, a pharmaceutical company in Berlin that is developing psychedelics for the treatment of psychiatric conditions, quickly directed attendees to look at the data for the treatments’ efficacy.
Some speakers at the summit praised treatments such as psychedelics and the blockbuster obesity drugs called GLP-1 agonists. Others, however, expressed a distrust of pharmaceutical companies and their products. “I don’t like taking medications,” Vance said, pointing specifically 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 said.
Beef-tallow crisps
The lack of representation of scientists dismayed some MAHA supporters, Diana Lutfi, founder of the Healing Science Policy Institute, a MAHA-aligned advocacy organization in Washington DC, told Nature at the summit. Lutfi and her colleagues organized thousands of scientists and clinicians in support of Kennedy before his confirmation as health secretary by the US Senate. She argues that tapping this network is key to cementing MAHA’s legacy beyond Kennedy. “But they’re seen as all corrupt by Kennedy and his inner circle,” she said, who “want to punish them for their role in COVID”.
MAHA Action, a New York City-based policy group that organized the summit, did not respond before publication to a request for comment about Lutfi’s statements.
At the end of the summit, attendees received MAHA-branded tote bags containing items from sponsors. Among them were a biography of Kennedy; creatine supplements, which supporters say help to enhance athletic performance; and potato crisps cooked in beef tallow, which Kennedy has praised as a healthier option than those fried in seed oils. Also in the bag was mouth tape, which is used to seal the mouth during sleep and which social-media posts say improves sleep quality by promoting nasal breathing.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on November 21, 2025.
