In many ways, the health freedom movement has the wind at its back, as the public's trust in the federal and state health institutions is at an all-time low following the abuses of the covid-19 era. Skepticism of government authority and corporate power were major factors in the electoral politics of 2024, so much so that shrewd maneuvering earned certain figures in the movement significant positions in the new administration. That maneuvering included a co-branding effort that generated the "Make America Healthy Again" slogan, which is quite popular in principle but whose tenets are unsurprisingly the subject of intense external scrutiny and internal debate.
While the influence of the pharmaceutical, insurance, and hospital lobbies persist in any administration, their clout has waned somewhat, and health freedom advocates and technology companies have filled the void. This is an unlikely pairing of newcomers, and the tensions are already clear. This persists even with attempts by HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. to bridge that divide by making statements like "[w]e think that wearables are a key to the MAHA agenda" and "[m]y vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years." To his credit, Secretary Kennedy later clarified his statements, adding that many people may rightfully choose not to wear health monitoring technology due to privacy concerns. But these comments fell flat with most of his supporters for rather obvious reasons, but were welcomed by the administration's tech-oriented donors.
This divide should come as no surprise. One group celebrates the autonomy of the individual to make health choices for themselves and their children, undaunted by mandates or coercive medicine. The other group, flush with cash, sees economic potential in the development of various tools that monitor, track, measure, inform, and surveil the user in the name of personal and public health, ideally subsidized or reimbursed by government funds.
There are tenuous areas of overlap where the two may work together, as both groups seek to create a new way of thinking about the health system. They both seek to consider alternatives to the traditional insurance and hospital-based complex, which is already collapsing under the weight of its tremendous expense and poor outcomes. What is built (or not built) in the ruins of this system is the question at play. It is important to note that the tension is inherent, as one group is operating from a position of principle, and the other is responding to incentives and opportunity.
While the health freedom movement provides political power, it cannot compete with the financial power of big tech. It is no secret that donor funding and support from the cash-flush technology sector has shifted dramatically toward the current administration, with the subsequent lobbying underway for contracts building government database infrastructure to next-generation warfare, and increasingly, in the health space. This latter area is of particular importance given the role of health advocate and now-HHS Secretary Kennedy's political alliance with the President, and the clear promises he made to improve public health outcomes, hold institutions accountable for abuse and overreach, prioritize product safety and reinforce the individual's right to direct their own medical treatment and health decisions.
These promises, of course, arose from a certain context. The authoritarian overreach the American public endured from 2020 through 2022 in medicine, public health, and all levels of government has had a deep and enduring impact on the population. From school closures to the elderly dying alone in prison-like nursing homes, from destroyed businesses to shattered trust in institutions, the country will simply never be the same again. Sadly, many acquiesced to the lockdowns and mandates at the time without comment. But not everyone was so sanguine. As of mid-2025, only 40% of parents plan to fully follow the government's recommended vaccine schedule, a seismic shift.
After all, under such conditions, how could a society not change drastically? Federal and state emergency law facilitated strict mask and quarantine mandates, enforced restrictions on travel and assembly, and institutionalized coercive medicine by way of vaccine mandates for rushed experimental products.
Technologically, the paradigm shifted as well. Smartphones automatically downloaded contact tracing apps that revealed the user's location and physical proximity to others, and shared this data with health "authorities" and private corporate actors across the world. Official digital vaccine passports restricting movement were introduced and implemented for years in Europe and Asia. But in the United States, despite the federal government's willingness to cooperate with foreign states and the World Health Organization on such efforts, the idea of a digital vaccine passport hit up against (what remains of) the bedrock American principles of personal responsibility, privacy, and freedom, and were quickly abandoned. Only in a few cities did full digital passports gain any sort of traction, but even these were short-lived.
However, we are still not free from the surveillance infrastructure that was unveiled during 2020, nor the apps and devices that were developed during this time period by those who saw opportunity in that draconian moment. Developers' motives surely ranged from paternalistic to altruistic, but it can fairly be argued that many investors, technologists, academics and government apparatchiks saw opportunity to expand the reach of technology into our lives, our health decisions and our data, and to strengthen the free informational interface between corporate and government entities, while doing so without regard to privacy or potential for abuse.
This was no surprise to those paying attention; even in the years before the covid-19 overreach, the Food and Drug Administration had already approved drugs with built-in ingestible sensors to monitor adherence to medicines for the benefit of insurance companies, drug companies, and allegedly, the patient. Many such radical technologies and strategies that were openly bandied about during the covid-19 crisis are still circulating and looking for patrons across the political spectrum to facilitate their implementation, and for subsidization through government reimbursement as health aids.
Clearly, this need for government support arises from the lack of genuine consumer demand for an endless stream of subscription-based, permanent glucose and blood pressure monitors, disease testing status apps, or implanted sensors for monitoring comprehensive vital signs at all hours. While some of these have clear individual benefit for certain individuals and conditions, there is also data suggesting this constant monitoring can have a negative health effect for the condition in question. More broadly though, the idea that these kinds of tools will suddenly turn around the worsening American chronic disease picture are not compelling, yet the idea has been increasingly pervasive inside the administration.
For infectious diseases, the picture is far darker. While most mandates have been rescinded and many legal battles won to roll back the worst excesses of this period (thanks in large part to the efforts of Health Freedom Defense Fund, whom I have the honor to advise), PREP Act legislation remains in force with the emergency declaration still active for sars-cov2 and several other diseases (pandemic influenza, zika, dengue, etc.). Under the Act, with very few exceptions, no private or government implementer or manufacturer of any pandemic-related "counter-measure" can be held legally liable for their actions, even if they resulted in injury or other harm from manufacturing defects.
Legally and administratively, the stage remains set for these technologies that monitor where we are, who we interact with, and our medical information, to be used or shared during the next infectious disease crisis we are constantly told will inevitably arrive. With $1.9 trillion of federal spending in 2024 on health care and services (27% of all federal outlays), the incentives are attractive to pursue new ventures into the health technology sector where government spending is assured. While chronic disease takes up the lion’s share of that spending, the most unregulated and liability-free corner of that sector remains infectious disease management. This seemingly permanent PREP Act immunity sets the stage for unique moral hazard around digital tools related to infectious disease, as it incentivizes a disregard for our rights and freedoms as new technologies are developed. Even against a recent backdrop of better state protections for health autonomy, the dynamics are dangerous for those that believe in medical freedom.
Within the active PREP Act emergency-law environment, health freedom legal rulings have succeeded in removing mask mandates and ending employer mandates, but have certainly not been universally positive. Wrongful death suits have been defeated by citing PREP Act protections, vaccine developer whistle-blower cases have been thrown out, and the 9th Circuit ruled that capricious mandates are indeed still in play in the school system, as long as the administrator thinks they are doing something helpful for just one individual. The American system of justice cannot abide emergency law for decades, yet the current PREP Act declaration evoked for covid-19 only fully expires in 2030.
Why build in strong device or app privacy or safety features if lawsuits are near impossible for an infectious disease monitoring tool? Why create a truly helpful product, or even try to convince the public of your product's value, when you could create a product that the government could suddenly mandate: something like an implantable PCR test+sensor, or a digital vaccine ID? Such products would have a stable, liability-free market like those enjoyed by vaccine manufacturers. These legal immunities and endless emergency budgets drive a certain kind of investor to support the development of very specific kinds of technological products—most of which the average American has little interest in spending their hard-earned money on.
So, what can be done to assure the priorities of health freedom and personal autonomy are maintained in this brave new world?
First, these incentives need to be re-adjusted. For this reason, it is critical that HHS Secretary Kennedy rescinds the PREP Act declaration immediately for covid-19, to allow civil society to function, and legal actions to proceed again as much-needed corrective forces to overreach. Even though the legal immunity would still exist retroactively, we would once again be on solid constitutional footing going forward.
Second, the health freedom movement needs to be clear in its demands for a health system that respects bodily autonomy, individual health choices, parental decision-making over their child's health, and an atmosphere of respect for privacy. If developed and used mindfully, apps and technologies could potentially fit into that rubric, but at this moment the financial power of the big tech companies is making somewhat of a mockery of these priorities, giving it lip service at best.
This was bound to be an inevitably messy time for health care and public health. The fact that the original covid-19-era abuses spanned two administrations from rival political parties has created new and quickly shifting allegiances. Today's circular financial architecture of big tech has all but assured endless cash that is searching for a home in a disrupted—but budgetarily enormous—health policy field.
The future of public health law, health policy, and individual liberty is unclear when it comes to the collision of technology and individual freedoms. But the movement arising among the American public that prioritizes health autonomy and individual choice cannot be allowed to be hijacked by technology companies' products, but rather supported by it, when and how that individual chooses.
Thankfully, the first society-wide experiment with pandemic counter-measures failed to become the "new normal" that we were told would persist forever, but its legacy remains. The remarkable political pole-shift has facilitated a drastic realignment of interests and created many surprising bed-fellows. If you had told an American in the 90s that by 2020s, the Republican Party would run and win on an anti-war platform and working-class message, and that the Democratic Party members would have infinite trust in pharmaceutical companies and a rushed vaccine developed under a military operation led by President Donald Trump, you would be laughed out of the room. Further, if you predicted that Americans would be forced (by both parties) to submit to the extreme lockdowns and vaccine mandates for extended periods of time, it would seem impossible.
But such is our current situation, where the currents of the past seem to have less and less to do with the realities of the present. It is a time of both great danger and opportunity. For those that believe in a future of health freedom, bodily autonomy, and bedrock American principles, the implications for this awakening of a digital leviathan are disturbing and demand immediate action.
