Vance Delivers Remarks at the Make America Healthy Again Summit, Nov. 13, 2025
November 13, 2025 · The White House · 0:26:11
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
Vice President JD Vance joined Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a conversation at the Make America Healthy Again Summit in Washington on November 13, 2025, at Kennedy’s invitation and in interview format at Vance’s request, as Vance said from the stage. Vance credited Kennedy’s team — naming Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya among others — with a private-sector mindset and a willingness to ask questions the public-health bureaucracy had not asked, and argued that debate, not silencing, is how science works, as he put it. He cited the administration’s most-favored-nation drug pricing work as an example of partnering with private industry where congressional action had not materialized, as he described it.
On Appalachia, Kennedy noted the region’s rates of cardiac disease, obesity, diabetes, stroke, addiction, and suicide as the worst in the country, as he stated them, and Vance described losing family members early to preventable illness, saying no male figure in his life had survived past about age 70, as he recounted it. On his own household, Vance described his family’s approach to food and medication — “anti-useless medication,” in his phrase — and on his job, he said the President requires honest counsel and does not want yes-men, as he described the relationship.
Why it matters
The summit conversation is the Vice President’s fullest on-record statement of the MAHA theory of the case: that the chronic-disease record is an orthodoxy problem before it is a funding problem. It also ties the health agenda to Appalachia’s health data, the region both men claim as their political home ground.
Sources: The White House, “Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks at the Make America Healthy Again Summit” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks as delivered at the summit.
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