By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times
Like the divine intelligence of the universe, the list of reasons that wellness influencer Casey Means should not be surgeon general is vast.
For one thing, she never completed her medical residency. She’s said that she dropped out of her program after a revelation about the corruption of the health care field, but the former chair of the department that oversaw her training told the Los Angeles Times that she left because of anxiety.
Means believes that the medical industry wants to make people sick to profit from their treatment, so she shows little interest in expanding access to traditional health care. In her bestselling book “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health,” she argues that metabolic disorders caused by unhealthy lifestyles are at the root of virtually every illness, including cancer, infertility, heart disease and depression. Failure to address the fundamental causes of these maladies means that “the more access to health care and medications we provide to patients, the worse the outcomes get.”
Means is obviously correct that the American diet is a disaster, and most people would benefit from better sleep, more exercise and stress-control techniques like meditation. What’s insidious in her philosophy is the notion that good choices and a positive attitude can obviate the need for modern pharmaceuticals. (Health is, alas, never limitless, even with the ENERGYbits algae tablets Means hawks on her website.) She is a vaccine skeptic, suggesting in her newsletter that “the current extreme and growing vaccine schedule is causing health declines in vulnerable children.” She’s also a critic of birth control pills; as she told Tucker Carlson last year, “The things that give life in this world, which are women and soil, we have tried to dominate and shut down the cycles.”
These views, however, are not the reason that some of Donald Trump’s supporters erupted into virtual civil war after he nominated Means to be surgeon general last week. (Trump tapped her after withdrawing his first choice, former Fox News contributor Janette Nesheiwat, who was found to have exaggerated her credentials.) Means is a close ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the secretary of health and human services. Yet much of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement has revolted against her nomination. It’s a rift that underscores the instability of a political coalition built on paranoia, distrust and the dogged pursuit of social media clout.
Among the loudest voices railing against Means is Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist who has achieved an outsize role in some of Trump’s personnel decisions. In a post on the social platform X, she zeroed in on Means’ new-age spiritual practices, detailed in a 2024 newsletter article Means wrote about finding love at 35. The surgeon general nominee described working with a medium, doing full-moon ceremonies and “plant medicine experiences,” and asking for help from trees. Loomer called her a crackpot and warned, without a trace of irony, “The inmates are running the asylum!”
At first glance, it might seem that we’ve fallen so far into the upside down that Loomer has emerged as a voice of reason, but that isn’t quite true. Means’ enemies in both MAGA and MAHA circles may think that emphasizing her woo-woo beliefs is the best way to sink her nomination. But in truth, most of them aren’t opposed to Means because she’s outside the medical mainstream. They oppose her because she’s not far outside enough, especially when it comes to vaccines, which she has raised doubts about but not denounced as agents of mass murder.
Even before her nomination, some anti-vax influencers had grown suspicious of Means and her brother, Calley, a wellness entrepreneur now working with HHS. They saw the pair as sketchy parvenus who were diverting their movement’s attention from vaccines to food, perhaps at the behest of shadowy outside forces. After the Means siblings appeared on Carlson’s podcast last year, right-wing radio host Shannon Joy devoted an entire episode of her show to raising red flags about them.
“Medical freedom newcomers Calley and Casey Means have burst onto the scene seemingly overnight, are very highly platformed, and while I appreciate their concerns about food and chronic health, it is slightly bizarre to me that they continually minimize the impact of vaccines,” she said.
Now that Means has been tapped to become surgeon general, such suspicions have led to a very public rift in Kennedy’s world. Nicole Shanahan, his former running mate, wrote online that someone — not Trump — seemed to be secretly controlling Kennedy. “With regards to the siblings, there is something very artificial and aggressive about them, almost like they were bred and raised Manchurian assets,” she said. Naomi Wolf, a liberal feminist turned anti-vax conspiracy theorist, wrote, “It looks to me as if both Casey Means and Calley Means have been sent to us by scarier interests than the CIA,” describing them as a spearhead for Silicon Valley powers hoping to harvest American’s biometric data. Mike Adams, who runs Natural News, an influential right-wing alternative health site, said of Means, “She’s an impostor, she’s a plant.”
Kennedy has responded to these attacks by accusing Means’ detractors of being paid shills for big food, which, as you can probably imagine, has made some of them even angrier. For decades, he’s been telling people that monstrous totalitarian powers control the medical system. In the subculture he’s helped build, scientific knowledge is found not in peer-reviewed articles, but down internet rabbit holes, and all appeals to authority are necessarily suspect. Now the dark energies he’s manifested are coming back to haunt him.
“I am becoming increasingly wary of the forces in the world that tell us to silence our intuition in favor of linear thinking and ‘expert’ advice,” Means once wrote. If MAHA types intuit that there’s something off about her, who can tell them otherwise?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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