Bisakah Casey Means, dokter bedah umum pilihan Trump, meyakinkan Amerika bahwa RFK akan Membuat Amerika Sehat Kembali? | Politik berita

Donald Trump Trump appointments Vaccines Food & health See all topics Facebook Tweet Email Link Link Copied!

Follow A series of tumultuous health policy changes seem to have shaken faith in Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.’s quest to tackle chronic disease and question science.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans now disapprove of the Health and Human Services secretary’s performance, according to a KFF poll released last week.

And six surgeons general from Democratic and Republican administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term, say he is “endangering the health of the nation.” Jerome Adams, Trump’s surgeon general from his first term, even said he should be fired.

Dr.

Casey Means, Trump’s nominee for the post, would play a key role in trying to convince Americans that Kennedy is, in fact, “Making America Healthy Again.” Young, Stanford-educated and a medical doctor, Means is well-connected to the MAHA movement as the author of a best-selling book, “Good Energy,” a wellness entrepreneur and a close Kennedy ally.

She has also questioned established science, but casts that stance as one of empowerment – telling people they should take charge of their own health and push for answers.

And the 38-year-old Means has important backers.

Besides Kennedy, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and his wife Katie Miller, a former Trump spokesperson turned podcaster, are early allies in the second administration.

“It was becoming a new mom, I would say, that radicalized me in the health space,” Katie Miller told Berita.

“That’s when I came across Casey and Calley and their book, ‘Good Energy.’ And kind of used it like my food Bible.” Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles was also influenced by the message of “Good Energy,” two sources familiar with the White House dynamics said.

Surgeons general can play an outsized role in shaping the public consciousness on health.

Past ones have pushed for initiatives from warning labels on alcohol to e-cigarette regulation.

A 1964 report commissioned by then-surgeon general Luther Terry on tobacco propelled Congress to require warning labels on cigarettes.

A pack of cigarettes with a health hazard label, pictured in 1966.

Harold M.

Lambert//Getty Images That, ultimately, is the level of influence that could come with the position, said Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group.

Lurie and CSPI oppose Means’ nomination, citing her lack of medical experience and positions such as skepticism on vaccines and birth control use, and the belief in singular causes of autism, which are all aligned with the MAHA movement but outside the mainstream of science.

“She’s a monumentally unqualified person.

It’s such a high-profile position, from a symbolic point of view, [that] it’s just tremendously worrying,” Lurie told Berita.

“Then the question is, what will she do with that position?” MAHA comes to DC Trump named Means as his surgeon general nominee in May after his first nominee, Dr.

Janette Nesheiwat, was abruptly withdrawn amid questions over her credentials.

Asked by a reporter why he picked Means, Trump replied: “Because Bobby thought she was fantastic.” Means and her brother, Calley, a lobbyist turned MAHA supporter and Kennedy adviser, have long been part of the secretary’s inner circle.

Casey Means, who did not respond to Berita’s requests for comment, has often told the story of her conversion to the cause.

The daughter of a former HHS and White House adviser, she rose to fame as a West Coast-based guru of alternative, holistic healing.

In “Good Energy,” co-written with her brother, she describes waking up to the problems of the country’s medical system after attending Stanford Medical School and then leaving an Oregon medical residency she was months away from finishing.

“I felt an overwhelming conviction that I couldn’t cut into another patient until I figured out why — despite the monumental size and scope of our health care system — the patients and people around me were sick in the first place,” she writes in the memoir, published last year.

The book earned her fans among wellness advocates, food policy activists, and eventually, on the political right.

A Tucker Carlson interview in August 2024 has racked up over 3.8 million views on YouTube, making it one of Carlson’s most-watched interviews of the past year.

That was followed by interviews on “The Joe Rogan Experience” (1.9 million YouTube views), reality star Kristin Cavallari’s “Let’s Be Honest” podcast (episode title: “Plastic in Our Brains?!”), and “The Megyn Kelly Show.” “I’ve met very few people like Casey,” Carlson told Kelly when he separately appeared on her show shortly after his interview with the duo.

When Kennedy endorsed Trump last August, the MAHA movement, and the Means siblings, were thrust further into the spotlight.

Kennedy name-checked both as he rallied voters about children’s health, “an issue that affects all of us far more directly and urgently than any culture war issue.” By that time, Casey Means was writing a popular newsletter named after her book.

One of her last dispatches was a wish list for government health policy that reads like an early draft of Kennedy’s eventual MAHA commission report — bans on conflicts of interest in government funded research, reforms to school and welfare food programs, and restrictions on pharmaceutical advertising, among other things.

“Her and Calley and Bobby…a lot of people in HHS have a certain sort of star power or cultural cache, or whatever you want to call it, that I think enables them to reach a broader audience and maybe penetrate a little bit more broadly than that is the norm,” said Emma Post, a former MAHA Action spokesperson and supporter of Means’s nomination.

Loyalties and controversies Yet there is consternation among both Kennedy and Trump’s supporters.

Trump ally and self-appointed “loyalty enforcer” Laura Loomer has frequently criticized Means, questioning her support for Trump and her qualifications for the job.

More recently, Loomer suggested to The Atlantic that Means was further unqualified because she was pregnant and due to give birth this month.

Some Trump insiders view the Means siblings, and MAHA, with a skepticism rooted in suspicion over rumors that Kennedy is positioning himself for a presidential run in 2028 and amassing power through influential allies like the two Meanses.

Kennedy has flatly denied this.

Other influential voices in the MAHA movement lamented the pick because Means has been noncommittal about actions on vaccines.

Fueled by Loomer and others, critics of Means have also suggested that she could harness her position to tip federal policies in favor of commercial interests in which she has personal stakes.

In 2019, Means co-founded a health tech company, Levels, that connects glucose monitors to a health tracking app on users’ phones.

Levels is a health tech company, co-founded by Casey Means, that connects glucose monitors to a health tracking app.

Means has said she would divest any interest in the company.

Levels Loomer resurfaced Means’ link to Levels after Kennedy told a congressional committee this June that HHS would launch a campaign encouraging Americans to use wearable health trackers.

“This is corruption at its finest,” Loomer wrote on X, suggesting in the post that both Means and Kennedy could profit off of wearable health technology.

Kennedy’s former running mate Nicole Shanahan called Means’ nomination “very strange” and later suggested that her concern was rooted in Means’ financial entanglements.

While she is still listed on Levels’ website as its chief medical officer, Means said in her financial disclosures that she left the position in 2023, and would divest any interest in the company.

She is currently still an adviser to the company but said she would resign if confirmed.

Her disclosures also revealed that she had family investments in Altria Group, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes and popular e-cigarette products, from which she also promised to divest.

Loomer “plays an important part in keeping everyone honest” but changing political views should not be disqualifying, said Katie Miller.

“There are a lot of people in President Trump’s second term who were not with us in President Trump’s first term, or even with us in the beginnings of 2021.

But we should welcome the opportunity to expand the tent and take on people who are there to fulfill specific missions, who now have seen the light,” she told Berita.

‘Challenges from the system’ Though the government shutdown has halted confirmation hearings, Means met with senators and staffers on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee last month, according to two people familiar with the process.

She now treads a fine line between assuring senators increasingly cautious about anti-vaccine rhetoric that she should be confirmed as the nation’s top doctor, and MAHA acolytes who want to see the administration — and Means herself — take a harder stance on vaccine policies.

HELP chairman Republican Bill Cassidy has publicly fretted about eroding vaccine confidence and the committee is still reeling from the abrupt ousting of Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Susan Monarez, less than a month into the job.

Monarez told senators in September that conflicts with Kennedy over vaccine recommendations sparked her firing.

A woman wears a red hat reading "Make America Healthy Again" during a Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Subcommittee Hearing, on Capitol Hill on September 9, 2025.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images/File Among the issues Means has spoken about are calling for ending liability protections for vaccine manufacturers — a shared priority with Kennedy — and raising concerns about the childhood vaccine schedule, though she has couched that vaccines are not her area of expertise.

Means has also talked a lot about women’s health — in particular family planning — as well as food and pesticides.

She has advocated against pesticides commonly used by commercial farmers, even drawing links between the birth control pill and environmental issues.

“You’ve got the pill, and it just goes hand in hand with the rise…of industrial agriculture, the spraying of these pesticides,” she said on Carlson’s show.

“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.” Pesticides are another thorny patch in MAHA politics — key senators from agricultural states want to protect access, but activists have so far been disappointed with the lack of more action on the issue.

If confirmed, Means would have the power to shape the national conversation on public health and trust in national health messaging.

“The number two spokesman for health crisis is the surgeon general,” said Michael Caputo, a political adviser and HHS spokesperson during the first Trump administration.

“MAHA requires a top-notch Surgeon General to communicate the reforms, especially because Bobby is not a doctor or a scientist.” The direction she’s expected to bring into the surgeon general role will be rooted in broadly popular habits like better food and more exercise, Calley Means told Berita.

“She’s going to be talking about people taking control of their own health in the midst of a lot of challenges from the system,” he said.

Donald Trump Trump appointments Vaccines Food & health See all topics Facebook Tweet Email Link Link Copied!

Follow