Illustration by Keith Negley
When I first spoke to Michael Lee Horrocks, the father at the center of my story about the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, he told me, “I feel like I’m living in crazy town.” Michael had watched his now ex-wife, a woman named Leah Stelly, tumble down what he described as a social-media rabbit hole during the pandemic. It didn’t take long before Leah believed that vaccines were dangerous. She soon started posting online about R.F.K., Jr., and committed herself to a holistic, “natural” approach to parenting. Her “crunchy mom outlook,” as Michael called it, became a source of conflict in the marriage and, later, in an ugly divorce. Then, this spring, amid a rise in measles cases across the country, Michael and Leah’s three young children became frighteningly sick. Two of them were unvaccinated. During a series of doctors’ and hospital visits, Michael was told their symptoms appeared to be “textbook measles.”In many ways, the story of the MAHA movement is becoming a story about what happens when the tenacity of belief meets with a hard biological reality. Although some of the MAHA coalition’s goals are admirable—reversing chronic disease, examining chemical additives in the food supply—the broader MAHA world view has weakened public faith in vaccines and encouraged a distrust of mainstream medical authority. This year, vaccination rates among kindergartners decreased across immunizations for measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and polio. In most states, measles-vaccination rates have fallen below the level required for herd immunity. Last week, the Pennsylvania Department of Health reported that two unvaccinated people had died from measles—the first such deaths of 2026.When I started out reporting this story, I scrolled endlessly on online parenting groups, learning the language of the “crunchy” and the vaccine-hesitant. I spoke to pediatricians who described painful conversations with parents who no longer trusted them as a matter of course. I spoke to mothers who were still immersed in the MAHA life style, and to mothers who had left the movement behind. I found Michael where much of the MAHA discourse plays out—which is to say, on Facebook. Like Leah, he was a small-time influencer and shared much of his personal life online. It was mid-April, and he had been posting pictures from various hospital visits of his sick kids. His middle child, Donnie, had a distinctive rash of flat red blotches across his face and neck. “I have fought tooth and nail in court to get my children vaxxed,” Michael wrote. “I’m so upset it’s hard to get into words.”Michael and Leah’s story has many twists and turns—there were conversations with a spiritual adviser, accusations of witchcraft, and an online fight over what, exactly, the kids were sick with. After the kids recovered, I travelled to West Virginia to meet with Michael. Eventually, I spoke to Leah, too. I found her to be a serious person, and open about her beliefs and the junctures in her life that had led her to those beliefs. Michael often described his and Leah’s situation to me with phrases like “absolutely bananas” and “too bizarre.” Yet as I’ve discovered in my reporting, parts of their story are playing out in more and more homes across America.More Top StoriesHow much is the Iran war costing Americans? John Cassidy breaks down the numbers, which extend well beyond the billions in military costs. Marlon James’s new novel, “The Disappearers,” was hailed in the Times as being perhaps the best book of the century so far. What does our critic Katy Waldman think of it? More than a century after its incendiary début, Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” remains wonderfully resistant to the dictates of beauty and taste. The most-clicked item in this weekend’s newsletters was about the causes of the deadly floods in Nepal.
