President Donald Trump introduced Wednesday that his new nominee for surgeon normal could be Dr. Casey Means, a wellness influencer with an inactive medical license who dropped out of her residency program.
“Casey has impeccable ‘MAHA’ credentials,” Trump wrote within the announcement, referencing Well being and Human Providers Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make America Wholesome Once more” slogan. The president promised that Means will “guarantee a profitable implementation of our Agenda so as to reverse the Continual Illness Epidemic, and guarantee Nice Well being, sooner or later, for ALL Individuals.”
Trump’s announcement comes a day earlier than affirmation hearings had been set to start along with his first surgeon normal nominee, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a household medication doctor and former Fox News contributor. She’ll work with Kennedy “in one other capability at HHS,” Trump stated.
Right here’s what you must learn about Means.
Trump says he doesn’t even know her.
When Trump took a reporter’s query about Means from the Oval Workplace on Thursday morning, he confessed he doesn’t know her.
“Bobby actually thought she was nice,” he stated, referring to Kennedy. “I don’t know her. I listened to the advice of Bobby. I met her yesterday and as soon as earlier than.”
Trump additionally boasted that Means “graduated first in her class at Stanford” ― although HuffPost couldn’t discover any situations of Means claiming this. Stanford doesn’t publicize its highest tutorial achievers from every class, and when requested to confirm Trump’s claims, the college would solely affirm that Means completed Stanford undergrad with honors in 2009 and graduated from its medical college in 2014.
She’s a residency dropout with no medical license.
After ending medical college, Means dropped out of her residency ― the multiyear post-graduate medical coaching program most docs want to finish to get their medical license.
“There was one thing inside me that was whispering after which talking a bit of louder, after which lastly was a deafening name to me that one thing is just not proper,” she said on Joe Rogan’s show final fall.
“Whenever you pop up for only a second and go searching at what is going on to American well being … it’s a catastrophe, it’s actually a catastrophe,” she continued, explaining her choice to discontinue residency in head and neck surgical procedure and start working towards so-called practical medication ― a holistic method to well being care targeted on discovering the foundation causes of illness.
Means’ Oregon medical license is listed as “inactive” as of January 2024.
Kennedy is already defending Means’ background.
“The assaults that Casey is unqualified as a result of she left the medical system fully miss the purpose of what we are attempting to perform with MAHA,” he wrote on social media.
At the moment, Means runs her firm Ranges, a wearable glucose monitor startup, and promotes her self-help wellness ebook, “Good Power: The Shocking Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Well being.”
She’s echoed Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracy theories and autism claims.
Means way more carefully aligns with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views than Nesheiwat, who’s praised the COVID-19 shot as a “present from God,” although she has pushed again in opposition to vaccine mandates.
In an appearance on Megyn Kelly’s podcast final 12 months, Means accused the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention of “jamming a vaccine schedule down our throat” and claimed the Meals and Drug Administration couldn’t be trusted to control vaccines as a result of a few of its high staff now work within the pharmaceutical business.
“We are able to’t query it or else we’re shamed for being horrible, anti-vaxx individuals,” she continued.
Means additionally linked autism and vaccines when she appeared on “The Joe Rogan Expertise,” saying, “It’s like, yeah, I guess that one vaccine in all probability isn’t inflicting autism. However what in regards to the 20 that they’re getting earlier than 18 months?”
In an Instagram post final 12 months railing in opposition to sugar cereals, Means claimed that autism and different circumstances are brought on by “artificially coloured, toxin infused, pesticide lined Frankenfood that’s poisoning their poor little our bodies.”
She’s referred to as contraception a risk to ladies’s “life-giving nature.”
Means closely leaned into a number of the anti-reproductive rights motion’s rhetoric round contraception, calling its use a “disrespect of life” throughout an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show.
“You’ve received these drugs which might be actually shutting down the hormones within the feminine physique that create this cyclical, life-giving nature of ladies,” she stated. “We principally informed ladies, ‘These hormones don’t matter. Your means to create probably the most miracle of any miracles, which is create life, simply shut it down, there’s no impacts.’”
Means is sounding a canine whistle for the conspiracy principle that hormonal contraception use has a long-term impression on ladies’s future fertility, one thing the American School of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has referred to as a “myth.”
Means’ claims may assist normalize the Republican get together’s assaults on contraception entry. Mission 2025 laid out a pathway to make it simpler for employers to refuse contraceptive protection of their staff’ well being plans, and through Trump’s first three months in workplace, one report discovered, 11.7 million ladies and ladies world wide had been denied birth control as a consequence of his dismantling of the U.S. Company for Worldwide Improvement.
Kennedy’s working mate isn’t proud of this nomination.
Nicole Shanahan, the billionaire Kennedy tapped as his working mate when he was a presidential candidate, has spoken out in opposition to Means’ nomination, saying she made Kennedy promise her he’d by no means give her or her brother, entrepreneur Calley Means, a job.
“I used to be promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate affirmation that neither of those siblings could be working underneath HHS or in an appointment (and that folks rather more certified could be),” she wrote on X. “I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what’s going on.”
She described the siblings as having “one thing very synthetic and aggressive about them.”
