The way Jessica Knurick sees it, the Make America Healthy Again movement won over Americans on social media — and so that’s where public health’s battle to win back people’s hearts and minds must be fought.

Knurick, a dietitian with a PhD, has become one of the faces of a fledgling counter-MAHA movement. She has 1.1 million Instagram followers and 335,000 followers on TikTok. She serves up snappy videos featuring news clips and charts to debunk the latest claims from US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other MAHA leaders. Her voice is playful but authoritative — making her explanations of basic scientific concepts more engaging and hopefully more likely to help people to navigate the sometimes-deranged social media wellness influencer ecosystem.

But before she began creating her own content, she was troubled by the transformation unfolding on social media. A shift was underway and became especially pronounced in the most personal way. She said that in 2019, during her first pregnancy, she recalled misleading and fear-based content for pregnant women being present but hardly overwhelming. But then the pandemic hit and polarized people about public health even more than they had been. When she had her second child in 2022, it seemed like that was the only kind of content she was being shown.

“A lot of people who maybe trusted science before, maybe trusted our institutions, or never even thought about them and went about their lives, they were in their houses on social media, and saw tons and tons of conspiratorial information and health information taken out of context,” Knurick told me in a recent interview. “That started laying the foundation for this anti-science, anti-public health movement we’re seeing now.”

The seeds for this transition had been laid over many years. Facebook and Instagram have overhauled their algorithms in ways that elevate fear-based content — and the wellness businesses that used that kind of marketing to target young women, and moms in particular, have thrived.

When Kennedy launched his presidential campaign in 2024, he gave this broad collection of people who feared toxins and chemicals and a corrupt food and medical industry a name: the Make America Healthy Again movement (MAHA). Now he is the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services under President Donald Trump and is remaking federal health policy in his and MAHA’s image.

Knurick and other public health experts believe parts of Kennedy’s agenda could actually lead to more sickness based on the available evidence; falling vaccination rates, for example, have already led to a historic measles outbreak this year.

But how do you persuade people when appeals to authority aren’t effective anymore, because many people reflexively don’t trust the experts?

That is Knurick’s project.

She is an expert herself and reads the latest research from reputable scholarly journals, as any trained dietitian would. But that is not the focus of her messaging. Instead, she told me that she is trying to figure out how to use the tools of the MAHA movement to argue that, while its concerns about chronic diseases are sincere and well-founded, its explanations for that crisis and its proposed solutions are misplaced. She knows she won’t convert everybody, but her Instagram follower count has grown from 150,000 to more than 1 million in the past two years; she says she receives DMs from previous skeptics, another sign that she may be making some inroads in her mission.

I spoke with Knurick about how she goes about the work of trying to counter MAHA on its own turf. Our conversation is below, edited for clarity and length.

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