In the final installment of our MOCHA REDUX series, Jamie and Melissa Anne break down one of the most contentious sections of the MAHA report: gender-affirming care. This episode explores how the Trump administration and MAHA frame gender-affirming care as “child chemical and surgical mutilation”. This is a phrase echoed in a 2025 CMS press release that warned hospitals about “irreversible” interventions for gender dysphoria. We provide an update to this section of the MAHA report in light of their MAHA Strategy report released in September 2025, and reiterate that this rhetoric misrepresents transgender healthcare and ignores both medical and nursing guidelines and clinical realities.

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In this episode, Jamie and Melissa Anne revisit MAHA's claim that American children are dangerously overmedicalized. While acknowledging real problems like antibiotic overuse and chronic illness, we argue that the MAHA report manipulates data and misses the bigger picture. We debunk misleading claims about ear tube surgeries, ADHD treatment, and psychiatric medication use in children and adolescents, and call out how evidence is selectively used to fit an ideological narrative.

Ultimately, Jamie and Melissa Anne emphasize that improving children’s health requires more than cutting prescriptions or regulating drug ads. It all comes back to social determinants of health like addressing housing, food access, insurance barriers, and other inequities. We also highlight what’s missing from MAHA’s plan: any mention of the leading causes of child death in the U.S., like firearms and motor vehicle accidents. This episode urges listeners to look beyond oversimplified solutions and engage in real, evidence-based dialogue about what children need to thrive.

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Today's Soapbox, Jamie talks about one of the most misunderstood issues in public health: vaccine exemptions. With vaccination rates slipping below herd-immunity thresholds in several states, and outbreaks making a comeback, we break down what religious, medical, and philosophical exemptions actually mean, and why the “religious objection” argument doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Despite rising claims of faith-based exemptions, major religious authorities across the world, including the Vatican, leading Jewish organizations, Islamic juristic bodies, and the Dalai Lama, all support vaccination as a moral responsibility that protects life and community. So where is the resistance coming from?

Jamie goes deeper, sharing her own early-2000s brush with vaccine skepticism, the impact of misinformation, and what she learned as a CDC public health nurse during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also look at how state laws shape vaccination rates and how nurses end up stuck in the middle of a highly politicized debate.

Most importantly: how do we talk about vaccines in ways that actually reach people? How do we respond to concerns without pushing families further away? And what happens when national leaders use their platforms to undermine trust in science?

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