Taking Shots: Casey Means Surgeon General Senate HELP Confirmation Hearing (LIVE COVERAGE TODAY)

You've never seen a live play-by-play breakdown of a Surgeon General nominee like this before

Last night, I made the mistake of flipping on the State of the Union address. I have no idea why I did that, since watching a feeble-minded, red-headed grifter lie incoherently for nearly two hours did nothing to enrich my life. I was relieved he didn’t mention monovalent measles vaccines or babies getting fried.

However, I get to spend my morning watching a different feeble-minded, red-headed grifter lie incoherently to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension (HELP) Committee for possibly more than two hours. Well, she might say words like “mitochondria” and “xenoestrogen” that sound very technical and erudite but they are not. Along with Jessica Malaty Rivera, MS and The Save America Movement, I will explain why in real time.

Today is finally the day that Casey Means, MD, brings her functional medicine bullshit to Washington for the most ludicrous job interview of her miserable, wellness-shilling life. Casey Means was nominated months ago for the role of Surgeon General. She was finally supposed to have her day with the HELP committee in November, but she conveniently went into labor. Weird how that happens when the hearing is scheduled a day or two before the due date. It was honestly a career magnum opus for a woman who has never met a challenge she couldn’t overcome by lying, quitting, or crying to her brother Calley so he will reply tweet about it. But alas, if Means wants the job, she’ll have to face the HELP committee at some point. That’s today.

Means is grossly unqualified to be the Surgeon General. Both the “Surgeon” and the “General” part are key here. The Surgeon General is the leader of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. They are literally a general, as in the military rank. They are also a surgeon, as in the military meaning. They are a doctor who is expected to be a practicing clinician. Means has not had an active license to practice in 7 years.

This is because one of the Surgeon General’s key roles, besides leading the Public Health Service, is providing medical advice to Americans. The medical advice Means would give is not encouraging. Means is a residency dropout turned metabolic fitness influencer who operates a company called Levels that sells blood glucose monitors to non-diabetics. Non-diabetics don’t need continuous blood glucose monitoring. Many type 2 diabetics don’t need it. But Means sells it, because it’s “functional medicine.” By measuring glucose in people who aren’t sick, you get to the “root cause” of disease. For Means, that’s mitochondria. 93% of people have dysfunctional mitochondria, according to Casey.

Now, I’m not trying to inflate my own expertise here, because I don’t really study mitochondria specifically, but I have dabbled. And I’ve dabbled more than Casey, since here’s a side by side comparison of our mitochondrial track record.

L: Rasmussen et al, J Virol, 2011; R. Means. Instagram. 2024.

Functional medicine is basically made up by grifters who actually know very little about any kind of medicine. She evidently did not renew her medical license when she dropped out of her residency. Means did not complete training, much less demonstrate a fraction of the professional accomplishment required to be appointed by the Senate as America’s Top Doctor. I bet she doesn’t even know what the folds of the inner mitochondrial membrane are called (cristae, free answer for you, Casey!)

I am on the Steering Committee for The Save America Movement, because I believe strongly that the assault on public health, science, medicine, and our government’s basic functional capacity is the greatest threat to America in my lifetime. Back in the before times, health policy and processes were boring because they worked. They were developed over decades within the federal government, which could be good and bad. But they were generally tightly regulated. We used to be a nation of laws.

It really bothers me is that shameless, corrupt con artists like Means can babble out cherry-picked factoids, mention glutathione a couple of times (it reduces oxidative stress in the liver), and proceed to rattle off an average of about 25 Instagram sponsor shout-outs, not all of which are disclosed. I don’t know or care if Casey Means actually likes the gross-looking pink pancakes that she seems SO excited to eat on Galentine’s Day (assuming this was before her ayahuasca prayers to the universe were answered) with her extremely enthused friend. I doubt my mitochondria would be cranking out the ATP over beetcakes that look like a heart-shaped slabs of scrapple, but to each her own. What I care about is that this vapid Instagram celebrity with medical knowledge she has chosen to ignore is profiting from giving advice that will harm or kill people.

The Surgeon General must be trusted to give thoughtful, informed, evidence-based guidance to Americans. They need to have the expertise to give this guidance. Means doesn’t have that expertise. She demonstrably does not have the expertise to select a non-seizure inducing option from her seemingly infinite closet of heinous floral patterns. This woman is a decade younger than me and she put on what looks like one of the potholders my grandma used to crochet in the bottom left number.

To quote Latto, “You a clown and I’m allergic.”

Enormously consequential policy decisions about our health are made by bureaucrats and advisory panels. It is boring. Now that everyone in the federal government is incompetent, however, it can sometimes be lively. It might be kind of fun to have someone like me, who is both a ruthless receipt collector and finds joy in thwarting her enemies well-laid plans to use the Office of the Surgeon General to scale her quack business nationally.

Nothing is more important to me than helping people understand the threat, but I know most of you probably aren’t reading academic journals for fun. I don’t read academic journals for fun. So maybe a few hours of tearing apart all of the lies Casey will tell might be informative. Here’s a preview:

• MAHA and MAGA are fighting over Trump’s recent Executive Order demanding glyphosate stockpiling. Glyphosate is better known as RoundUp, which was developed by Monsanto. Casey believes food can cure almost anything. She does not like food sprayed with glyphosate. Neither do the MAHA moms, and they feel betrayed by the Executive Order. Watch what Casey says about glyphosate. She’ll probably try to weasel out the way Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy did earlier in the week. Basically: glyphosate is the most toxic thing since the SARS2 spike protein expressed from a mRNA vaccine, so I hate it, but I love Trump. All hail Trump!

• Watch Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA). He chairs the HELP committee and is a hepatologist. He is under extreme fire for moving Kennedy’s nomination forward in 2025. He may be looking to make an example out of her. He’s also a hepatologist, so maybe he’ll ask if her baby got the hepatitis B vaccine (HBV) birth dose.

• Casey will likely try to soften her crazier ideas, like trees have feelings, autism is caused by babies getting too many vaccines at once, and the world is crawling with xenoestrogens giving kids gender dysphoria

• She will also almost certainly say she’s not anti-vax or anti-woman, but she also hates vaccines and hates the pill

• She’s been leaning into the tradwife vibe, but as with everything Means, it’s all a veneer of traditional values. She kept her last name and is an investor and executive of a snake oil Silicon Valley startup backed by $20 million from Marc Andreesen. She is an entrepreneur. She’s an entrepreneur without any morals, so that bodes poorly for everyone taking her Surgeon General advice. Don’t get me started on her taste in farmhouse dresses.

The HELP Committee MUST not advance Means past committee. She’ll use her power as Surgeon General to transform the public health service into a bunch of root cause energy healers instead of a service branch of the US military, that runs into disasters to save lives. She’ll take away your vaccines and birth control, and give you a blood glucose monitor and measles instead. And she and her brother, whose company has operationalized FSA/HSA tax fraud, will get rich off your money and give you nothing in return.

HELP Committee: please let it be so I never see this scam artist again, and certainly not in a Surgeon General’s uniform

We were going to cover the Advisory Committee of Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting, but it was postponed. See you there in mid-March.

See you today at The Save America Movement’s Substack for the pre-hearing breakdown!