Means Gets 86ed But Not MAHA

Just because they seem less crazy doesn't mean that they are more sane

After weeks of agonizing waiting, finally Casey Means—skeptic of vaccines, fan of the color blue, believer in divine estrogen, psilocybin-fueled husband quest sojourner, residency program dropout, and all-around functional medicine quack—was finally booted from being the nominee for Surgeon General after withdrawing her nomination hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee.

This is good news for Americans. Now Means will not have an official government platform on which to run her con about how the only way to solve our impaired mitochondrial energy production is to subscribe to all of her various revenue streams and get her company Levels to install a blood glucose monitor you don’t need (if you are not diabetic) or a series of lab panels your actually licensed, board-certified doctor could order for you with insurance coverage. These data can then be used to sell you all kinds of additional services that you also don’t need, which she helpfully provides for an $80/year base rate subscription.

This is the underlying principle of functional medicine, which is the invented specialty that Means supposedly practices now: generate tons of meaningless medical data and use it to sell supplements and other unproven remedies. Functional medicine is not a recognized specialty in medicine and Means doesn’t practice any medicine—not legally speaking, anyway—because she does not have an active medical license. What she means by “practicing” is serving undisclosed sponsored smoothie-blending reels on Instagram, posting selfies of herself perusing cabbages at the Farmer’s Market in homely flour sack dresses, defaming glucose, and milking the public’s ignorance about the Krebs cycle for personal and political gain. These all disqualify a Surgeon General.

The Surgeon General doesn’t have much input into policy, but they are effectively America’s doctor. They provide trusted medical advice to the entire nation. The reason the advice is trusted is that they have always relied on evidence to provide guidance. The Surgeon General’s job is to be deeply informed on the current scientific evidence and convert that into calls to action and advisories or warnings.

It turns out the Surgeon General does more advising than just label cigarette packs

They are providing medical advice, so they need to be qualified to practice medicine, not quackery. That means actually having a medical license and a board certification, both of which indicate that not only does this person have the education and the clinical training, but they are also able to meet government and professional standards for their particular specialty. Obviously a neurosurgeon has to meet different requirements for board certification than a gynecologist. Physicians also have to maintain a certain number of continuing medical education credits (CMEs) to keep their licenses and board certifications. This ensures that physicians are keeping up with their field: going to conferences, attending trainings on new techniques or procedures, or contributing to mentorship and training themselves. Whenever I give a talk at a medical conference in the US, there is always added paperwork to define my talk’s CME “learning goals” and “objectives” for the physicians who are using my talk to stay up to date on the field. The Surgeon General theoretically should always be CME-maxxing. Casey Means spent the past several years writing a blog that is a long ad for her various sponsored products, all of which are related to MAHA.

Means does not rely on evidence for anything. She has had no medical education since she dropped out of her ear, nose, and throat surgical residency. She did not complete her medical education, so she sure isn’t continuing it. She does not rely on evidence, but on vibes and jargon salad babble about metabolic disruption. A post from her newsletter last May describes her wish list for the MAGA/MAHA era and it reads like she prompted ChatGPT with “pro-Trump call to the polls but without taking sides but don’t really be all that subtle because MAHA.”

Not only is she unqualified, she is uniquely unqualified because she would not only be incompetent. All of her quackerous, destructive medical nonsense would be laundered with the veneer of credibility from her position and she would actively encourage Americans to adopt unhealthy or even dangerous health practices. American voters seem unimpressed with overt woo-woo MAHA bullshit and Means’ withdrawal is clearly a response to that, but that doesn’t mean the MAHA bullshit squad is retired. They are just getting less obviously deranged than the psychedelic tree whisperer.

Bad Bobby Energy?

This is not good news for US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He was counting on Means to amplify and lend medical credibility to his pseudoscientific ideas. Now, he’ll have to settle for her doing it via solely influencing. He was so unhappy about it that he told a few lies to pad Means’ CV on her way out and made no secret of whose head should roll for this offense to the MAHA movement, which Kennedy seems to confuse with an actual religion.

Kennedy and President DONALD J. TRUMP are laying this defeat on Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Chair of the HELP Committee, for “intransigence and political games.” That’s a pretty rich set of accusations coming from a dude whose entire rise to authoritarian power has relied heavily on both of those things (possibly explaining how Trump even knows the word “intransigence”).

I’m no political games expert, but Cassidy doesn’t seem to do that very well. He gets some zingers in during HELP hearings, but generally he seems to be pretty bad at navigating his position. He very stupidly accepted Kennedy’s promise that he was seriously not going to do anything anti-vax and confirmed him. When Kennedy broke that promise immediately with his pathetic response to the measles outbreak in Texas, Cassidy did nothing.

Cassidy continues to do nothing, other than heckle Kennedy in HELP hearings on the rare occasions that he appears to flagrantly lie to the Senate, as he has done on all prior visits to date. Cassidy is a board-certified hepatologist and knows at an expert level how harmful Kennedy’s policies are, so he does at least attempt to muster the courage to put on a show of defending his professional integrity and the lives of his constituents. For his vote to convict Trump for January 6th and his mostly toothless disloyalty to the MAHA agenda, Cassidy is being primaried and he’s probably going to lose. His primary opponent’s campaign manager is the former Principal Deputy Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who was appointed by Kennedy for being anti-vaccine promotion and pro-over the counter ivermectin and quit two months later for “family reasons.” It’s unclear if he is related to or otherwise qualifies as “family” to Julia Letlow, Cassidy’s Trump-backed primary opponent, but he’s her campaign manager.

Cassidy asked Casey Means tough questions too. He also sat on her nomination for months without bringing it for a vote, which as HELP Chair he is solely empowered to do. Although in theory this was because Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME) were so fraught with their typical grave concerns that they could not bring themselves to vote yes and Cassidy did not have the guts to take responsibility for calling the vote that would tank her nomination. So he let the White House do the dirty work for him, selecting an alternative candidate who is theoretically more palatable for voters in the midterms than a glorified glucophobic mitochondria fetishist who resorts to druidism to get a date.

While it seems like this should be a defeat for Kennedy, it isn’t really. Kennedy has seemed as though he’s being reined in: it’s widely reported that Kennedy’s adventures in upending the childhood vaccine schedule isn’t all that popular with Americans. More measles outbreaks isn’t polling well, and things are already looking pretty bad for all the Republicans in some places, especially where they can’t deceitfully gerrymander their way out of being desperately derelict in their duty to their constitutents. Kennedy himself is generally unpopular, as nearly half of registered voters disapprove of his job performance, according to the KFF Health Tracking Poll. However, the MAHA and MAGA bases remain united in their overall support of Kennedy, even though there are growing divides between different factions.

Kennedy’s job is probably safe for now, at least as long as he continues to make concessions on his more militant and weird pseudoscientific ideas both MAHA and MAGA voters

Most people don’t actually want widespread preventable death in children. Most people actually have not bought into the MAHA movement, despite the enthusiastic attempts of the HHS propaganda squad to make you think that denim-clad milk-drinking in a jacuzzi with Kid Rock is the secret to robust health. But Kennedy does.

He doesn’t need to post overtly anti-vax material from the HHS accounts when he can still meet his expected leathery peptide-fueled weirdness quota by interviewing convicted rapist and established human flesh-biter Mike Tyson on his podcast about “real food” without mentioning vaccines once.

Surrogates like Aaron Siri, Del Bigtree, MAHA Action, and Children’s Health Defense can continue to dole out the hard stuff—microchips, ivermectin, spike toxicity, deep misconceptions about nearly every fundamental concept in biology and really all science, viruses are good, 5G wireless, electromagnetic radiation, Died Suddenly, energy healing, Plandemic, and every other wild reason offered to eager MAHA recruits looking for their preferred angle for normalizing and justifying mass child death eugenicist insanity.

Kennedy still believes all that. He just has other people preaching the MAHA Good News in his place. He is able to still make up a bunch of stuff about food and demonize science and lie shamelessly about virtually everything and more or less continue outdoing himself in every possible category of incompetent and/or evil job performance measures, so long as he doesn’t say the “V” word. Kennedy can exercise more consequential and lasting control over vaccine policy by staying quiet about it and killing them through administrative and regulatory mechanisms that are too boring for most people to notice or pay attention to for long.

He can still have Casey Means’ sage wisdom in some sort of advisory capacity, while presenting a more palatable, professional, not-at-all-concerned-about-that-vaccine-stuff face of MAHA to the electorate. They are going to appear bland enough to seem non-threatening, and kill children while counting on their actions to be so boring you don’t pay attention. Enter the new Surgeon General nominee.

The OG MAHA Mom

Casey Means’ replacement is Nicole Saphier, who is an improvement in the sense that she is qualified. She is a board-certified radiologist who leads the breast imaging center at a Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center location in New Jersey. She’s a former Fox News medical contributor who claims to be pro-vaccine, but she is staunchly opposed to the liberty-destroying vaccine mandates that are to blame for all the woes MAGA/MAHA policies have inflicted. She misinterpreted a normal meeting of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) including COVID vaccines in the Vaccines For Children (VFC) program as a mandate to forcibly vaccinate children. Even her herbal tincture supplements side grift seems more professional than Means’ mitochondrial support tacos, since she markets them as “nutraceuticals” (nutritional supplements dressed up with a lot of clinical-sounding language because they measure various uninformative and often irrelevant or imaginary metrics).

She also invented the term “MAHA,” or at least was the first to spell it out. She wrote a book in 2020 called Make America Healthy Again: How Bad Behavior and Big Government Caused a Trillion-Dollar Crisis. That trillion-dollar crisis was the COVID-19 pandemic and the bad behavior that caused it was Joe Biden’s tyrannical imposition of mandates and lockdowns, orchestrated by the nefarious Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony S. Fauci. These talking points were in Saphier’s proto-MAHA book before MAHA really took off as a thing and they are evergreen today now that Kennedy is high priest of the cult. She’s never seemed crazy, just skeptical. She has years of experience expressing her skepticism with polish and experience on Fox News.

Never mind that most of these supposed mandates and lockdowns didn’t happen (seriously, I was in the US for all of 2020 and at no point was I forcibly “locked down” in my house. The bulk of the stay-home orders and essential worker only mandates occurred in 2020 under the first Trump administration. Never mind that Fauci’s greatest supposed offenses against MAGA medical freedom occurred when he stood at a podium and calmly explained the stay-home and public health orders being implemented by President Trump. Saphier will gladly engage in the time-honored MAHA tradition of revisionist history in which every bad thing ever was caused by Biden.

Saphier remains unqualified for the job because she is telling the same lies as Means. The Surgeon General should not use their platform as America’s top doctor to peddle MAHA propaganda and sell snake oil and cures for diseases that don’t exist. She may have credentials, but she also has a demonstrated record of embracing health positions that are unsupported by evidence and driven by a political agenda rather than medical or scientific ones.

Casey Means will not torment us as Surgeon General, but her replacement could be worse in that she will be more credible and effective. She doesn’t trip balls and talk to trees. She will explain everything very reasonably to her former colleagues at Fox News in a professional and serious way, and she’ll eviscerate American health in the name of MAHA all the same.