JD Vance, widely considered to be the Republican frontrunner for the presidential election in 2028, is aligning himself with the Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement as some say it is shedding its grassroots supporters in favor of political and corporate interests.

The US vice-president has positioned himself as the inheritor of Make America Great Again (Maga), and attaching himself to Maha, which many in the Trump administration believe helped to win the 2024 election, signals a greater overlap between the two movements as the administration’s popularity plummets amid the war in Iran and rising prices.

More than two-thirds (68%) of rural Maha supporters said that Trump’s health policies have “had a negative effect or no impact on the health of people where they live”, according in a new AP-KFF survey that highlights the disconnect between the sprawling political project and its grassroots support, especially in rural areas that overwhelmingly supported Trump in the 2024 election. More Americans view the president and vice-president unfavorably than favorably, according to a January survey by Pew Research.

At the Maha summit in Washington DC on Tuesday, Vance traded jokes about memes and the “carnivore” diet of meat and fermented foods with Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the leader of Maha.

But Vance also highlighted his role in identifying what he says is fraud in Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act marketplace – blaming it on immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants.

“We’ve found close to $250bn in fraud just since I’ve been leading the anti-fraud task force,” Vance claimed, though the administration has released scant details on who has been unenrolled from these programs and why the activity was considered fraudulent.

Vance said that “the states that administer the programs don’t enforce them at all”, claiming that undocumented people were receiving Medicare benefits, though there is no documentation that this is occurring. “Cut that shit out and be honest about your intentions. It’s about giving benefits to illegal aliens,” Vance said to applause.

Kennedy alluded to the more cost-efficient health systems of Europe, which have universal healthcare, to speak about the inefficiencies of the health system in the US, where costs have been “allowed to get out of control”. Vance seemed to point to the need for stronger regulation of the health system, saying that programs like Medicaid and Medicare are stronger when fraud can be detected – though the Trump administration has largely focused on deregulation.

Speaking at the event, Vance underlined “the politics that Maha is stirring up”, said Art Caplan, professor emeritus at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. “I think Vance was there making a calculation. He wants to replicate what Trump did, get the Maha devotees on his side, not Rubio’s.”

Vance poked fun at secretary of state Marco Rubio, his closest political rival, saying Rubio “doesn’t have a great poker face”, which makes for “absolutely incredible” meme material. “Bobby and I are on a text chain with a bunch of the cabinet secretaries, where we’re basically beating social media to the memes,” Vance said, describing one image of Marco in a blonde wig after Dolly Parton died.

The second annual summit showcased the fracturing of the Maha movement, which has often been an uneasy alliance among environmental, nutrition and anti-vaccine activists, and political and corporate actors. The event appeared to eschew the former and prioritize the latter, featuring companies like UnitedHealth, Walmart and Anthropic, including companies with active business before the US government. Grail, an experimental cancer-treatment company whose approval is currently before the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), was a top sponsor.

Companies that paid $300,000 were given the option of speaker slots, as well as a private dinner with Kennedy and Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), according to reporting by Bloomberg.

The Maha Center, which organized the event, is one of many Maha-affiliated endeavors headed by Tony Lyons, a longtime vaccine critic, who has paid Kennedy $4m in the past year. Tickets were available for “Maha members” who pay $6,000 a year to Maha Holdings, whose sole board member is Finn Kennedy, Kennedy’s 29-year-old son.

“The Maha summit, I thought, was a giant conflict of interest,” said Caplan, adding that the “ethically disturbing” event appeared to be “pay to play” to access high-ranking officials in the Trump administration. Speakers included Oz; Brooke Rollins, secretary of the US Department of Agriculture; and Stefanie Spear, a top Kennedy aide. “Normally, you don’t get a chance to cozy up to FDA officials. That’s troubling,” Caplan added.

While Maha appears to be fracturing in favor of corporations, it could still prove a powerful movement for Vance, Caplan said: “If he can get half of what Trump got, even if there’s a split, he’s doing well.”

The strong focus on corporations was not lost on Maha activists. “Why are they excluding our voices?” Mary Talley Bowden, a doctor who opposes Covid vaccines and was reprimanded for stealthily providing unproven Covid treatments, said on X.

The lineup did not “reflect the issues that birthed the original Maha movement and drove voters, especially women, to show up and vote for this coalition”, said Kelly Ryerson, also known as the Glyphosate Girl. Some of the speakers “could not be less Maha”, she added.

Maha has been “captured” by the very corporate interests it sought to fight, Robert Malone, a conspiracy theorist who voted to restrict vaccines while he was a member of the now-halted vaccines advisory committee, wrote on his Substack – decrying the “incestuous nature” of Maha, where “conflicts of interest seem to multiply by the day”.

Kennedy, who has long railed against corporate influences affecting Americans’ health and wellbeing, was notably quiet about corporate power at the event. Instead, he praised companies like OpenAI, which has millions of dollars in US government contracts.

“Today, it would be malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or to make a prescription without at least checking AI,” he said, attributing the quote to OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Kennedy added that large language models “can give you a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country”. About a third (32%) of Americans consult AI for medical information and advice, though AI chatbots are inaccurate about 25% of the time.

“We’re never, ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us ‘trust the experts’,” Kennedy said.

“If somebody tells you ‘masks work, trust the experts’, AI may tell you otherwise. If somebody tells you ‘social distancing works, trust the experts’, AI may correct that. And if somebody tells you that ‘a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection, so you need to take it to protect your grandmother’, AI may say ‘it actually doesn’t do that’, So it really has the capacity to dominate us and free us from medical tyranny,” Kennedy said.

His “fringy science agenda was on full display”, Caplan said. If Kennedy aligns himself with Vance and Vance wins the election, “it gives him power to pursue some things that he cares about”.

Vance has long seen Kennedy’s faction as essential for Trump’s success, and he also spoke at the Maha summit in 2025. But fewer than one in four Americans (23%) view Kennedy favorably, according to a new survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center.