Governors from across the country played host to a variety of health conspiracy theories in Colorado Springs Saturday, as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expounded on his “Make America Healthy Again” initiative in a fireside chat.

With Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Lee moderating, Kennedy repeated a litany of false and misleading claims, including assertions that aluminum in vaccines causes food allergies and that diabetes can be cured through diet, to about a dozen governors gathered together for their National Governors Association summer meeting.

He also suggested the use of AI in telemedicine and said “fee-for-service medicine” gives doctors and insurance companies “the incentive to keep Americans sick.”

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One initiative Kennedy elaborated on was the Department of Health and Human Services’ collection of Medicaid data from states with the intention of anonymizing it to create a public database for independent scientists to be able to study. He claimed that “the medical establishment and the government were not able to give good data to people” during COVID, in response to a question from Lee on how to measure the efficacy of federal and state approaches to public health.

As governor of Tennessee, Lee banned mask mandates during the pandemic and “touted Tennessee for being one of the last to close early in the pandemic and among the first to reopen,” according to the AP.

Kennedy was confirmed as President Donald Trump’s pick for the nation’s top health official in February despite a long history of false statements about vaccine safety, among other conspiracy theories. Throughout the panel he repeatedly referred to the country being in a “chronic disease epidemic,” going so far as to question whether the real reason the U.S. had a high COVID death rate — about 3,000 deaths per million, the 17th highest rate in the world — was due to chronic disease in America.

“So what was killing them?” he asked. “Was it COVID, or was it the chronic disease?”

Kennedy previously visited Utah lawmakers in April after they passed multiple bills aligning state law with MAHA initiatives, such as banning fluoride in water. In late June he visited Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican, as he signed a bill claiming processed foods are “poisoning” children.

With this summer meeting, Kennedy was able to pitch his MAHA agenda to Democratic governors as well, including Governor Jared Polis, who asked why nothing has changed in treating allergies that are well-known, such as peanut allergies.

Kennedy claimed that it is not known why peanut allergies develop, and repeated his false claims that aluminum in vaccines are causing allergies, specifically targeting the Hepatitis B vaccine in the meeting. In reality, some vaccines contain aluminum salts that help bolster immune responses.

Polis cheered Kennedy’s appointment in a a November social media post, saying that he was “excited” by Trump’s pick for health secretary.

“He helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA,” Polis said at the time. “I hope he leans into personal choice on vaccines rather than bans (which I think are terrible, just like mandates).”

As health secretary, Kenedy has scrutinized children’s vaccine schedules in a May report without evidence, ousted the entire scientific committee that advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine use, and most recently, rescinded federal approval for a flu vaccine with a specific preservative that vaccine skeptics have falsely linked to autism.

Polis is currently chair of the NGA, a bipartisan public policy organization made up of governors across the country that formed in 1908. According to their website, they help challenge and shape federal policy across party lines.