Opinion: What MAHA’s support for Russell Brand tells us about the movement

Even before the prison sentence, MAHA happily palled around with Brand, despite the British police charging him in April 2025 and again in December 2025 with multiple counts of rape and sexual assault. The charges did not come out of nowhere: In 2023, three British outlets jointly published a special investigation into allegations against Brand.

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, who has said he wants the NIH to become “the research arm of MAHA,” shared billing with Brand at a November 2025 MAHA Summit. Earlier that year, Kennedy posted a photo of himself clutching a lizard, as Brand and a shirtless Oz put their arms around him, all smiles.

Perhaps most shocking of all, Oz chuckled at a joke about sexual consent that Brand made at the October 2026 MAHA Summit.

Oz told the audience that Brand was almost late because he was backstage “hugging the Secretary of Agriculture,” Brooke Rollins, to which Brand replied, “She initiated that contact, I should make clear, doctor!” I agree with Holly Baxter, senior reporter at The Independent, who said that of course the jocular exchange between Brand and Oz looks bad now, “but it should’ve looked bad then, when the court case was on the horizon, so let’s not expect much hand-wringing from Oz, MAHA-maven RFK Jr., and the other Trump health officials who embraced Brand over the past two years.”

The alliance between MAHA and Brand is not an aberration, it’s a pattern of befriending violent misogynists. MAHA made Mike Tyson, another convicted rapist who said in 1989 that he enjoyed hurting women, the face of its healthy eating campaign. Bhattacharya even posted a picture of himself with a Tyson face tattoo and the message “Be like Mike Tyson.” The New York Times reported that Donald Trump Jr., who championed the MAHA movement at Turning Point USA’s 2025 annual conference, “once called Andrew Tate a friend and publicly defended him against previous criminal allegations.” Tate is a leader of the manosphere who faces extradition to Britain on multiple charges including rape and sex trafficking.

You might think the shellacking that MAHA-allied candidates suffered in the midterm elections, despite major financial support from MAHA Action, would have led the MAHA bosses to rethink their allegiances. You’d be wrong.

On Nov. 6, for example, Kennedy celebrated Stephen Miller’s appointment as President Trump’s chief of staff, saying, “Next to me, Stephen Miller is the strongest MAHA supporter in the administration. It’s time to unleash the Kraken.” Miller is the man behind the inhumane family separation policy in Trump’s first term. He is also the architect of ICE’s brutal tactics during Trump 2.0. Kennedy has defended ICE tactics on Joe Rogan’s show and provided support for the horrific treatment of undocumented immigrants. Across the country, unaccompanied immigrant children as young as 3, who came to the U.S. to be reunited with their families, have faced sometimes tough interrogation by judges, nearly always having to represent themselves in court without a lawyer. Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services is legally required to care for them through its Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), and federal law requires these children be provided with legal counsel, fair hearings, and accommodation appropriate to a child’s age. But Kennedy, who has adopted harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and who falsely argues that immigrants are disease vectors, refused to renew the contract to provide legal services for these children. And almost 90% of undocumented children are now being held in unlicensed ORR shelters in Texas, exempt from oversight and inspections.

Since the MAHA wipe-out in the midterms, there have been an endless slew of articles pondering how MAHA will change course. But MAHA’s rotten core of violence, including its love for Brand (who Lyons called “an incredible human being”), is one big reason why I’m deeply skeptical that “MAHA 2.0” will be any different. Beth Mole, senior health reporter at Ars Technica, notes that leaders of the grassroots wing of the MAHA movement remain “doggedly loyal” to Kennedy. They’re loyal to a man who has worked with Trump to roll out policies that I believe are inherently violent, who has espoused eugenicist views, and who shows zero signs of remorse.

There was violence in the MAGA/MAHA administration enacting policies that will throw 15 million people off health insurance, that cut off an estimated 2 million kids from food assistance, and that killed federal health research that could have improved the health of minoritized Americans. There is eugenics in the way that Kennedy blames the weak for their sickness, believes only “sick kids should die of measles,” and once said he wants to remove Black kids from their families and “reparent” them on government-run farms.

So when I think of MAHA’s future, there’s an old proverb that comes to mind: “The fish rots from the head down.” The head is, of course, Kennedy, MAHA’s supreme leader. Unless he radically changes his views and policy directions — which seems extremely unlikely — MAHA is destined to be that rotting fish in perpetuity.

Gavin Yamey is a professor of global health and public policy at Duke University in Durham.