The movement that helped put Donald Trump back in the White House is now threatening to tear his coalition apart over what they’re calling a “bait and switch” on vaccine policy.
In an open letter released Monday, 168 prominent figures from the Make America Healthy Again movement warned President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that they’re “on the brink of civil war” if the administration doesn’t follow through on promises to rein in mRNA vaccines.
The signatories aren’t fringe voices. They include Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. All three have found themselves on the outs with Trump in recent months, but their influence among grassroots conservatives remains substantial.
“We did not fight to place you in positions of leadership so that our clearly stated policy goals would suffer a ‘bait and switch’ that rebranded the grassroots powerful objection to the damaging mRNA platform as a concern about coloring agents in Skittles,” the letter states, taking a direct shot at the administration’s focus on food dye reforms while sidestepping vaccine concerns.
The letter’s central demand is clear: total market removal of mRNA products that carry liability shields under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act. “Health freedom voters can and will walk away if we continue to see inaction, or condescending non-policy, on our core issues,” the signers declared. “You will pay a political price.”
The threat isn’t empty rhetoric. The coalition is promising to recruit and fund their own candidates at the state level, support primary challengers, and push legislation in Congress ahead of the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential race.
Among the medical professionals who signed are doctors who faced serious professional consequences for questioning COVID vaccines: Idaho’s Ryan Cole, Utah’s Kirk Moore, and Texas’s Mary Talley Bowden. Louisiana Deputy Surgeon General Sean Troxclair, an internal medicine and critical care specialist who has cited vaccine injury as the prompt for his Christian conversion, is the highest-ranking current government official among the signatories besides Massie.
HHS responded Monday afternoon through press secretary Emily Hilliard, who defended the administration’s record in an email obtained by Just the News.
“Secretary Kennedy has been clear that he believes mRNA products warrant heightened scientific scrutiny,” Hilliard wrote. She noted that HHS “wound down investments in mRNA vaccines for upper respiratory viruses because the technology does not effectively protect against infection from rapidly mutating viruses such as COVID-19 and flu.”
The department redirected those resources “toward other promising technologies,” Hilliard explained, while adding that HHS “continues to support mRNA research where the science shows promise, including for hard-to-treat cancers” through a public-private partnership with the National Cancer Institute.
For many health freedom advocates, that answer falls far short. They supported Kennedy precisely because he was the nation’s leading vaccine skeptic, and they expected bold action, not bureaucratic caution.
The timing presents a real political problem for Trump. Massie, who demanded a year ago that the FDA “immediately revoke licensure of the mRNA COVID shots,” was already targeted by Trump after leading the push to release unredacted Epstein files. The president backed a successful primary challenger against the congressman.
