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Dr. Casey Means — a Stanford-educated surgeon, best-selling author, wellness influencer, and vaccine skeptic — has been nominated by Donald Trump for surgeon general, ensuring her place as a leading voice for the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.
In a Truth Social post, the president even hailed Means, who will face Senate hearings for her confirmation in coming weeks, as having “impeccable ‘MAHA’ credentials.” Trump announced the 37-year-old as his new nominee after his first pick, Janette Nesheiwat, withdrew from the post.
When pressed about what led him to pick Means to inform the public of the best health advice, the president told reporters: “Bobby thought she was fantastic.” The comment signals Means had the backing of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., known for his vaccine skepticism who has already made sweeping changes to the department.
Without explicitly stating that she is part of the MAHA movement, she has voiced support for RFK Jr’s agenda. The HHS secretary “has a vision for the future that aligns with what I want for my family, future children, and the world,” Means wrote on social media after the president’s announcement, praising his decades-long health and environmental advocacy.
Means grew up in Washington, D.C. before heading west to attend Stanford, where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in Human Biology with honors in June 2009 and her medical degree in June 2014, the school confirmed to The Independent.
As a trained surgeon, specializing in head and neck surgery, she said she was operating multiple procedures a day before she, as she describes it, woke up to America’s health crisis. “The system is rigged against the American patient to create diseases and then profit off of them,” she told Tucker Carlson last August.
Her wake-up call happened in the operating room during her fifth year in surgical residency.
The patient lying before her was about to undergo her third sinus surgery. Although Means knew how to diagnose, write prescriptions for, and operate on the patient, she had no idea why the patient, who suffered from a variety of other ailments, was actually sick, the doctor told Carlson.
It wasn’t just her one patient; Americans were overall getting sicker.
Noticing a recent rise in chronic illnesses, like dementia, diabetes, and obesity, she became disillusioned with the medical field. At 30, she ended up “putting down her scalpel forever,” she told Joe Rogan last October. Means then decided instead to focus on the root cause of why Americans are getting sicker, and she believes the core problem is metabolic health.
That’s the focus of the book she co-wrote with her brother Calley Means: Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. The 2024 New York Times bestseller discusses how to take small steps to improve one’s health.
This includes eating healthily, sleeping more and leading an active lifestyle — aspects that Levels, the company she co-founded, tracks. For $199 per year or $40 per month, users can monitor their metabolic health insights through data, like diet, glucose levels, sleep and exercise.
Means has echoed some of her future boss Kennedy’s stances.
She’s spoken about raw milk, and how the issue is overregulation, not milk. “When it comes to a question like raw milk, I want to be free to form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then decide if I feel safe to drink the milk from his farm,” she told Bill Maher in November. Before Trump was elected, Kennedy vowed to end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of raw milk. The CDC has said drinking raw milk can lead to “serious health risks.”
She’s also a vaccine skeptic. She has advocated for research into the “cumulative effects” of vaccines.
“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 her latest newsletter.
Means has questioned why babies are inoculated within the first few hours of being born, claiming the practice puts people on a “pharma treadmill for life.” She argued on Carlson’s show that newborns don’t need to be vaccinated with Hepatitis B shots, for example, because it’s “a sexually transmitted disease and IV drug-user disease, of course, which babies are not going to be exposed to.” According to the CDC, infants are usually given a Hep B vaccine because if they get infected, they have a 90 percent chance of developing a lifelong, chronic infection. Additionally, many women are not symptomatic and don’t know they’ve been infected, so they could potentially pass along the infection at birth.
Her brother also claimed that the FDA was only testing drugs — not vaccines — through the double-blind studies, a golden standard in the medical field in which one group is given a placebo and the other is given the drug but neither the participants nor the researchers know which group received which tablet.
The HHS and its head repeated this claim last month when the department issued a new policy requiring placebo testing on all vaccines; the move essentially questions the safety of all longstanding vaccines. Many experts have pushed back against this allegation, stating that many childhood vaccines have been tested against a placebo, and warned of the dangers of adding a step to the vaccine approval process.
Part of the issue with medical research, the brother-sister duo argued to Rogan, is that it is studied in isolation rather than as a whole. That includes the impact of vaccines and its potential link to autism, she said, referencing another Kennedy buzzword.
“I bet that one vaccine probably isn't causing autism but what about the 20 [vaccines] that [kids] are getting before 18?” Means asked Rogan.
The surgeon has advocated taking a holistic approach to medicine.
She’s repeatedly argued to study the body as a whole. Means told Bill Maher in November about America’s “disconnection crisis” in treatment.
“We’re disconnecting the body into 100 separate parts and not seeing it as a unified system,” she told the comedian. What humans have done to the environment is a reflection of what Americans have done to their bodies, Means added, citing pesticides and treatment of animals.
This argument gets to another point Means frequently makes: she believes America is suffering from a spiritual crisis.
“We cannot go on poisoning the earth without destroying our own health; we are one with nature,” she wrote in her most recent newsletter.
Humans used to be very connected to nature, the doctor has said. America’s current health crisis is “simply a reflection of a destroyed ecosystem and humans have become so powerful and so technologically advanced and so connected in the recent decades that we now actually do have the power to destroy our world and destroy our health.”
Perhaps there’s no greater metaphor for this disconnect between nature and humans today, as far as Means is concerned, than the birth control pill.
Contraceptive medications “are literally shutting down the hormones in the female body that create this cyclical, life-giving nature of women,” Means said. “The spraying of these pesticides, the things that give life in this world — which are women and soil — we have tried to dominate and shut down the cycles. We have lost respect for life.”
She praised the pill as “liberation” for women, giving them the freedom to choose what to do, but then suggested it was being overprescribed. Birth control pills are being “prescribed like candy,” Means told Carlson, arguing that they’ve also been used for treatment of acne and polycystic ovarian syndrome.
The surgeon believes PCOS — the leading cause of infertility in the U.S. — could be treated naturally with a change of diet rather than with drugs.
Infertility has become a recent talking point of the Trump administration. Trump has dubbed himself the “fertilization president” after expanding access to in vitro fertilization.
Means has no children of her own but said she cannot wait to become a mother one day. She told Carlson: “I can think of no greater thing that we can do than have children and keep them healthy.”
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