When someone is nominated for an important position in the US Department of Health and Human Services, they are evaluated and advanced to confirmation by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee. It’s basically a job interview, except it’s televised and it can be a circus if the nominee is controversial. That describes literally every nominee that has appeared before the HELP committee.
Yesterday it was Casey Means’ turn. She showed up with her entire squad of metabolic warriors, ready to deflect every question and talk about her undergraduate years as if she was scrubbing in for surgery as a sophomore. So The Save America Movement, Jessica Malaty Rivera, MS, and I also showed up, ready to correct her in real time.
It’s a good thing we did, because Means responded to nearly every question with a lie. She misrepresented everything from basic cell biology to vaccination to drug regulation to soil health to agricultural practices. She was unable to answer basic yes or no questions about her own beliefs, including whether vaccines cause autism and whether the universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine was a good idea.
Her favorite answer was “it’s complex.” Then she would proceed to oversimplify actually complex science or policy questions to the equivalent of one of her Instagram posts about cellular energy. As always, everything for Means is about “root causes,” which to hear means “mitochondria.” Mitochondria are real and important and they do produce cellular energy, but they are not directly fueled by “real food” or whatever and most of us have mitochondria that work just fine. Her understanding of where disease comes from is fundamentally flawed. The “root cause” she’s identified, sometimes for diseases that aren’t diseases, like feeling tired or autism, isn’t the root cause for most of the things she claims are metabolic. Most of the time, the root cause of feeling tired is not getting enough sleep. The root cause of COVID is SARS-CoV-2 infection.
The only thing that’s “complex” about this for Means is that she and her brother will not be able to sustain lucrative revenue streams for products people don’t need if this mitochondrial “root cause” nonsense is shown to be absurd. It costs a lot of money to hire a shaman for a psilocybin-fueled husband-seeking vision quest, like the one Susan Collins questioned her about with regard to her tolerance for using illegal drugs.
She especially juiced up her own qualifications. She repeatedly said she’s seen thousands of patients, even though she never practiced in a recognized field of medicine. She has a certificate in functional medicine, which is an invention to give credibility to ordering constant unnecessary medical tests. She made it sound like she still has a medical license because it was her choice to not keep it active when she decided to quit medicine before completing her training. She’s not an experienced physician. She chose to be a residency dropout. She’s a failure by choice.
Several Republicans on the HELP committee seemed unmoved by her obfuscation, including HELP chair Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA). But he ended up advancing RFK, Jr. anyway, so right now everyone should let their Senators know that her nomination should die like a mitochondrion in the presence of ultraprocessed food.
Also, can someone explain why they all showed up wearing matching shades of blue? I try not to criticize people’s looks, but what people wear is a choice. I dress to project the image of me I want people to see in the world, which is why I cannot abide Casey’s closet of garish floral prints. But I know a coordinated look when I see one and now I can’t unsee the fact that all of the people Casey identified as her family were all wearing the same shade of methylene blue.
Whatever this is all about, we don’t want to see it with the medals of the US Surgeon General on it.
LET YOUR SENATORS KNOW: DO NOT CONFIRM CASEY MEANS AS SURGEON GENERAL
