A outstanding voice within the “Make America Healthy Again” motion seems earlier than a Senate committee this morning in a bid to turn into the nation’s prime physician.
Dr. Casey Means, best-selling creator, wellness influencer and Stanford medical graduate, grew to become an early ally of now-Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA marketing campaign. Along along with her brother Calley, who serves as an adviser to Kennedy on the Health and Human Services division, Means has championed wholesome consuming, restricted pharmaceutical use and different treatments.
That’s made her a recognizable, early advocate of the MAHA movement. President Donald Trump chosen Means to be surgeon general final May, the identical day the White House withdrew its nomination of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat.
Means’ nomination drew criticism from advocates and a few former officers on the time as a result of the surgeon general is usually a doctor with medical expertise; Means had dropped out of her medical residency program and her medical license had lapsed. She defined her determination to depart residency in her 2024 e-book, “Good Energy,” as disillusionment with the medical system and its incentives.
Means was initially scheduled to seem earlier than the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee final October, however went into labor along with her first youngster within the hours earlier than the hearing.
Now, Means will testify throughout a fraught second for the administration’s well being agenda. A string of high-profile departures and shakeups have renewed questions in regards to the route of vaccine coverage beneath Kennedy. An ongoing measles outbreak, already the largest because the US declared the illness eradicated, is threatening to attain 1,000 circumstances within the close to future. Republican senators, together with well being committee chairman Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, have publicly pressured the administration to curb entry to abortion tablets. MAHA advocates, in the meantime, are railing in opposition to Trump’s govt order to shielding pesticide producers.
While the function of surgeon general doesn’t carry coverage or regulatory authority, surgeons general usually assist form the nationwide well being dialog and construct public momentum for coverage change. Most famously, previous surgeons general led the push to add warning labels to cigarettes.
Means has advocated for “unbiased research” into the childhood vaccine schedule and questioned the protection of giving a hepatitis B vaccine shortly after delivery.
“I bet that one vaccine probably isn’t causing autism, but what about the 20 that they’re getting before 18 months?” she mentioned on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2024. While Means’ feedback echo the skepticism of Kennedy and others within the administration, there isn’t a proof linking the childhood vaccine schedule to autism diagnoses.
Means has in a roundabout way addressed abortion and the tablet, mifepristone, that has prompted Republicans’ ire and a number of lawsuits about prescribing it remotely.
But the nominee has talked in interviews about different facets of ladies’s well being, together with the widespread use of contraception, as an indication that “we have lost respect for life,” as she mentioned on Tucker Carlson’s present in August 2024.
Those feedback introduced consternation from public well being advocates, equivalent to Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science within the Public Interest, a nonprofit client advocacy group, who told NCS last year that she is unqualified for the surgeon general place.
Means may even testify as MAHA acolytes rally for the administration to take sturdy motion in opposition to pesticides equivalent to broadly used glyphosate, generally identified by the model title Roundup.
In that area, MAHA might have an ally in Means, who has likened widespread pesticide use to the harm she sees from long-term contraception.
“You’ve got the pill, and it just goes hand in hand with the rise … of industrial agriculture, the spraying of these pesticides,” she mentioned on Carlson’s present. “The things that give life in this world, which are women and soil, we have tried to dominate and shut down the cycles.”