It's the master of public health awardees who are running public health. An MPH is a two-year degree which does not require you to have any prior training in health, in biology, or in medicine. It's primarily focused on the use of big data and statistical analysis, often to optimize single variables, which is consistent with the idea that we have narrow—I would use the term siloed—sectors within the federal bureaucracy.

These bureaucratic structures tend to drive toward optimization of those parameters that they believe are within their domain to the exclusion of impacts on other domains and other parameters. As a matter of fact, this is one of the big challenges in bureaucracy. They're often fighting over the boundaries between their silo and adjacent silos, and who has the right to control those boundaries and how those resources are allocated across those silos.

The practice of medicine has a centuries-long history of rejecting and ridiculing innovators and dissenters. It's no surprise that all of this follows a narrative that we have seen played out over the centuries, where physicians, who are taught to assimilate a set of truths without question, and to implement and regurgitate those truths, are extremely resistant to change. They view change as heresy. In many ways, what we have in modern public health and medicine more closely resembles a religion than it resembles anything that we might call science. In our books, we refer to this as scientism, and we assert that scientism has been substituted for religion in modern political action and thought. So, this religion of belief in a set of endorsed scientific truths, or pseudoscientific truths, is scientism, and it has a high priesthood.

MAHA and MAGA
Now I'd like to talk and specifically focus on this new dialectic that exists between Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) as a movement and Make America Great Again (MAGA) as a movement.

They're actually two separate things, and they have different constituencies and different drivers. In many ways, they resolve into proregulatory big government initiatives versus promotion of deregulation and small government. In theory, Make America Great Again is more aligned with libertarian principles. Make America Healthy Again, in my opinion, is much more aligned with big government and regulation.