President Donald Trump introduced Wednesday that his new nominee for surgeon common 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 Health and Human Providers Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” slogan. The president promised that Means will “ensure a successful implementation of our Agenda in order to reverse the Chronic Disease Epidemic, and ensure Great Health, in the future, for ALL Americans.”
Trump’s announcement comes a day earlier than affirmation hearings had been set to start along with his first surgeon common nominee, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a household drugs doctor and former Fox Information contributor. She’ll work with Kennedy “in another capacity 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 really thought she was great,” he stated, referring to Kennedy. “I don’t know her. I listened to the recommendation of Bobby. I met her yesterday and once before.”
Trump additionally boasted that Means “graduated first in her class at Stanford” ― although HuffPost couldn’t discover any cases of Means claiming this. Stanford doesn’t publicize its highest educational achievers from every class, and when requested to confirm Trump’s claims, the college would solely verify that Means completed Stanford undergrad with honors in 2009 and graduated from its medical faculty in 2014.
She’s a residency dropout with out a medical license.
After ending medical faculty, 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 something inside of me that was whispering and then speaking a little louder, and then finally was a deafening call to me that something is not right,” she stated on Joe Rogan’s present final fall.
“When you pop up for just a second and look around at what is happening to American health … it’s a disaster, it’s literally a disaster,” she continued, explaining her resolution to discontinue residency in head and neck surgical procedure and start practising so-called purposeful drugs ― a holistic strategy to well being care targeted on discovering the basis causes of illness.
Means’ Oregon medical license is listed as “inactive” as of January 2024.
Kennedy is already defending Means’ background.
“The attacks that Casey is unqualified because she left the medical system completely miss the point of what we are trying to accomplish with MAHA,” he wrote on social media.
Presently, Means runs her firm Ranges, a wearable glucose monitor startup, and promotes her self-help wellness guide, “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.”
She’s echoed Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracy theories and autism claims.
Means much more carefully aligns with Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views than Nesheiwat, who’s praised the COVID-19 shot as a “gift from God,” although she has pushed again in opposition to vaccine mandates.
In an look on Megyn Kelly’s podcast final yr, 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 workers now work within the pharmaceutical trade.
“We can’t question it or else we’re shamed for being terrible, anti-vaxx people,” she continued.
Means additionally linked autism and vaccines when she appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” saying, “It’s like, yeah, I bet that one vaccine probably isn’t causing autism. But what about the 20 that they’re getting before 18 months?”
In an Instagram publish final yr railing in opposition to sugar cereals, Means claimed that autism and different situations are brought on by “artificially colored, toxin infused, pesticide covered Frankenfood that’s poisoning their poor little bodies.”
She’s referred to as contraception a risk to girls’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 look on Tucker Carlson’s present.
“You’ve got these medications that are literally shutting down the hormones in the female body that create this cyclical, life-giving nature of women,” she stated. “We basically told women, ‘These hormones don’t matter. Your ability to create the most miracle of any miracles, which is create life, just 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 affect on girls’s future fertility, one thing the American School of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has referred to as a “myth.”
Means’ claims might assist normalize the Republican social gathering’s assaults on contraception entry. Undertaking 2025 laid out a pathway to make it simpler for employers to refuse contraceptive protection of their workers’ well being plans, and through Trump’s first three months in workplace, one report discovered, 11.7 million girls and ladies all over the world had been denied contraception because of his dismantling of the U.S. Company for Worldwide Growth.
Kennedy’s operating mate isn’t pleased with this nomination.
Nicole Shanahan, the billionaire Kennedy tapped as his operating 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 was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment (and that people much more qualified would be),” she wrote on X. “I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on.”
She described the siblings as having “something very artificial and aggressive about them.”
