To understand why Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is attacking the hepatitis B vaccine, look to the rhetoric coming from his loudest fans in the anti-vaccine movement. According to the misnamed Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, the only women who get hepatitis B are filthy degenerates. Jillian Michaels, the former reality TV star-turned right-wing demagogue, declared last year that the hepatitis B vaccine is only useful for “drug addicts and people who have risky sex.”
“Are we protecting them for a lifetime of unprotected sex and drugs?” a popular MAHA advocate complained on X, apparently thinking it’s self-evident that that such protection is unnecessary for good people. A favorite anti-vaccine podcaster tweeted that hepatitis B is a disease of people who have “anal sex” and who get “stuck with a needle full of blood of an infected person.”
Across X, so-called “MAHA moms” have made it clear that they feel insulted by the pre-Kennedy recommendation that newborns get vaccinated for hepatitis B, as if the doctor is implying that, as mothers, they are among the “bad” women who do drugs or have what they consider the wrong kind of sex. This is why Susan Monarez, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned during her Senate testimony last week that Kennedy was ignoring scientific evidence to attack vaccine access, including a hepatitis B vaccine administered to newborns. On Friday, under fire from medical experts and several Republicans, Kennedy’s hand-picked CDC vaccine panel postponed a vote on whether to delay the newborn immunizations. But with the secretary’s army of MAHA moms insisting the vaccine is an attack on their purity, the threat of a policy change is not over.
Moral dictates, of course, don’t protect infants from hepatitis B. As pediatrician Dr. Paul Offit told the New York Times last week, unvaccinated babies can get the virus — even if their mothers aren’t infected — “from relatively casual contact with people who had chronic hepatitis B.” Unlike adults, “you’re especially vulnerable as an infant,” he said. But don’t expect MAHA moms to accept that reality. Their draconian rules for what makes a “good” mother are such that they’d still blame women if babies got infected, because proper mothers heavily police their child’s contact with the outside world.
On Sunday, Kennedy and the MAHA movement’s obsession with shaming women was on full display with the Washington Post’s report that HHS is set to tie autism risk to women who use Tylenol during pregnancy. As with most claims coming from Kennedy’s disinformation-happy machine, this finding is false. But it’s easy to see how the idea fits neatly into the right’s sexist vision of motherhood as a state of endless self-sacrifice. Tylenol is already discouraged for treating minor aches and pains during pregnancy. The medical consensus is that it should only be used to battle high fevers that can be dangerous for both the mother and the developing fetus. But the vision of a woman enduring misery to “protect” her baby is romanticized by the right — even if the suffering would, in this case, only risk the health of the baby.
The newly released report from the so-called MAHA Commission also underscores how Kennedy and his allies are hyper-focused on shaming women, even if it comes at the expense of harming children. Even though it was advertised as the “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,” the report includes almost no substantive proposals for government action to improve child health. Instead, it shifts even more responsibility for child health outcomes onto the parents. Most of the strategy is about “educating” parents about what Kennedy believes is proper child-rearing, including his esoteric and false ideas about nutrition. (The secretary, for instance, thinks eating a diet high in animal fat is good, contrary to the wide consensus of medical experts.)
Even on the issue of environmental pollution, which Kennedy claims to care about, the onus is on parents, not on government regulators. The report recommends that HHS “inform the public, especially parents and caregivers, about how environmental factors can affect children’s health outcomes.” In other words, if you live in a high-pollution area, it’s on you to move. If you can’t afford it, it’s your fault for being poor. The polluting companies, and the government that is supposed to regulate them, are blameless.
In fact, the biggest government initiative proposed in the document is deregulating food safety standards, which would make it easier for shady operations to sell goods at farmers markets. A lot of MAHA types argue that food regulation should be left to individual consumers to investigate every purchase individually and determine if it feels safe to them. Casey Means, a “wellness” influencer President Donald Trump nominated to be surgeon general on Kennedy’s recommendation, has rejected pasteurization requirements. Instead, she has argued that women should “form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then decide” if the milk is safe.
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First and foremost, this recommendation is profoundly stupid. One cannot tell if a cow’s milk is safe by petting the animal. But what Means recommends would require a time commitment that is not feasible for most people, especially busy mothers. With the deregulation of food safety being pushed by the Trump administration, the process of “researching” your own food would reach far beyond just milk. Even if driving to the farm and buying everything directly were a way to verify food safety — and it’s not — it’s ridiculous to expect modern people to forgo the basic convenience of the grocery store. This would also mean having to cook way more from scratch.
Recommendations like these may not seem overtly sexist. But with the larger MAGA movement pushing traditional gender roles, there can be little doubt that women will be the ones expected to handle the new influx of responsibilities pushed on them by the MAHA culture. It’s women who would be expected to give up pouring a child a bowl of cereal in favor of making bread from scratch. It’s women who would be tasked with staying home with kids who have measles. And if those children were to die, women would be blamed for supposedly not feeding them enough homegrown organic foods.
The movement’s preoccupation with shaming women is evident in the fertility section of the MAHA strategy document. A call to “address the root causes of infertility” sounds innocuous enough. In reality, this phrase is MAHA code for shaming women who use birth control. As I reported last month, various MAHA groups have become fixated on the lie that the birth control pill is the cause of infertility. Means has made the podcast rounds, blaming birth control for infertility. Alex Clark, who was hired by Charlie Kirk to be Turning Point USA’s “wellness” influencer, has also argued that women suffering infertility brought it on themselves by previous birth control use.
It’s all a lie — but the strategy fits into the larger moralism that fuels the MAHA movement and is centered around this notion that modern life has made women “impure” and children’s health problems are a direct result. Having sex for pleasure is the main source of this alleged “impurity,” of course, and it’s why both birth control and abortion are demonized. Vaccine opponents even falsely claim that vaccines contain the cells of aborted fetuses, an explicit reminder of their belief that children are being tainted by the wanton sexualities of modern women.
Last week, the New York Times reported on how the measles outbreak that killed at least two children in Texas is impacting vaccination opponents in the state. To the reporter’s apparent surprise, it turns out these people don’t appear to care if children die. They seem to view such tragedies as a price to pay to uphold a right-wing values system that is obsessed with ideas of purity and traditional gender roles. The anti-vaccine views are wrapped into larger sexist attitudes. They expect women to home school children. They create banks of breast milk from unvaccinated women and demand babysitters be unvaccinated.
The idea that female bodies are made unclean by vaccines is all tied up in a larger sexist view that good women stay at home and avoid too much contact with the outside world. Republicans may have not liked the pandemic lockdowns, but when it comes to women, a version of that is being upheld as a permanent alternative to the fictional evils of vaccines.
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