President Trump said on Wednesday that he would nominate Casey Means, a Stanford-educated doctor turned critic of corporate influence on medicine and health, as surgeon general.
Dr. Means, an ally of the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has described becoming disillusioned by establishment medicine. She rose to prominence last year after she and her brother, Calley Means, a White House health adviser and former food industry lobbyist, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show.
What is her field of medicine?
Dr. Means, who trained as an otolaryngologist and head and neck surgeon, left surgery behind without finishing her training to practice so-called functional medicine, which focuses on addressing the root causes of disease. She published a diet and self-help book last year titled “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.” Before that, she had been best known for founding Levels, a company that offers subscribers wearable glucose monitors to track their health.
She has focused on the prevalence of chronic diseases in the United States and has taken aim at obesity, diabetes and infertility, problems she has attributed to the use of chemicals and medications and Americans’ sedentary lifestyles.
What has she said about vaccines?
Dr. Means has echoed some of Mr. Kennedy’s skepticism of vaccines, calling on the new administration to study their “cumulative effects” and to weaken liability protections offered to vaccine makers as a way of encouraging them to develop new shots.
“There is growing evidence that the total burden of the current extreme and growing vaccine schedule is causing health declines in vulnerable children,” she wrote in an October newsletter.
Child health experts are adamantly opposed to trimming the list of recommended immunizations, warning that such changes would trigger outbreaks of deadly infectious diseases. And they have noted that the government makes available the safety data used to license vaccines and the safety data generated after they are put into use.
What has she said about the food supply?
Dr. Means has also pushed for a concerted campaign to pare back corporate-friendly policies related to the production and sale of food and medicine. For example, she has supported serving more nutritious meals in public schools, investigating the use of chemicals in American food, putting warning labels on ultra-processed foods, forbidding pharmaceutical companies from advertising directly to patients on television and reducing the influence of industry among drug and food regulators.
“American health is getting destroyed,” she said at a Senate round table event on food and nutrition in September. “If the current trends continue, if the graphs continue in the way that they’re going, at best we’re going to face profound societal instability and decreased American competitiveness, and at worst, we’re going to be looking at a genocidal-level health collapse.”
