Meet Dr. Casey Means: A wellness influencer, vaccine skeptic, and Trump’s pick for surgeon general

Dr. Casey Means — a Stanford-educated surgeon, best-selling author, wellness influencer and vaccine skeptic — is Donald Trump’s pick for U.S. surgeon general, ensuring her place as a leading voice for the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.

In a Truth Social post last year, the president hailed Means for her “impeccable ‘MAHA’ credentials.” Trump announced the 37-year-old influencer as his nominee after his first pick, Janette Nesheiwat, withdrew from consideration.

Her nomination has the support of Trump’s top health official and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , who has already made sweeping changes to the Department of Health and Human Services. When pressed about what led him to pick Means to inform the public of the best health advice, the president told reporters that “Bobby thought she was fantastic.”

RFK Jr. “has a vision for the future that aligns with what I want for my family, future children, and the world,” Means wrote on social media after the president’s announcement.

Means was set to appear for her Senate confirmation in October but her appearance was delayed after she went into labor with her first child.

“Everyone is happy for Dr. Means and her family. This is one of the few times in life when it’s easy to ask to move a Senate hearing,” HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard said in a statement.

Means grew up in Washington, D.C., before heading west to attend Stanford, where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in human biology with honors in June 2009 and her medical degree in June 2014, the school confirmed to The Independent.

As a trained surgeon, specializing in head and neck surgery, she said she was operating multiple procedures a day before she, as she describes it, woke up to America’s health crisis. “The system is rigged against the American patient to create diseases and then profit off of them,” she told right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson in 2024.

Her wake-up call happened in the operating room during her fifth year in surgical residency.

A patient lying before her was about to undergo her third sinus surgery. Although Means knew how to diagnose, write prescriptions for and operate on the patient, she had no idea why the patient, who suffered from a variety of other ailments, was actually sick, the doctor told Carlson.

It wasn’t just her one patient; Americans were overall getting sicker, she said.

She became disillusioned with medicine after noticing a trend in chronic illnesses, such as dementia, diabetes and obesity. At 30, she ended up “putting down her scalpel forever,” she told podcaster Joe Rogan last October. Means then decided instead to focus on the root cause of why Americans are getting sicker, which she believes is due to metabolic health.

That’s the focus of the book she co-wrote with her brother Calley Means: Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. The 2024 New York Times bestseller discusses how to take small steps to improve one’s health.

Those steps includes eating healthy, sleeping more and leading an active lifestyle — aspects that Levels, the company she co-founded, tracks. The subscription-based company ($199 per year or $40 per month) lets users monitor their diet, glucose levels, sleep and exercise.

Means has also echoed Kennedy’s controversial claims and public health misinformation.

“When it comes to a question like raw milk, I want to be free to form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow, and then decide if I feel safe to drink the milk from his farm,” she told Bill Maher in November.

Before Trump was elected, Kennedy vowed to end the Food and Drug Administration’s “aggressive suppression” of raw milk. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drinking raw milk can lead to “serious health risks.”

She’s also a vaccine skeptic who has advocated for research into the “cumulative effects” of vaccines.

“There is growing evidence that the total burden of the current extreme and growing vaccine schedule is causing health declines in vulnerable children,” she wrote in her latest newsletter.

Extensive testing is required for every vaccine, and research shows that getting multiple vaccines at the same time is safe, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which does not recommend delaying or spacing out childhood immunizations.

“Her credentials, research background, and experience in public life give her the right insights to be the surgeon general who helps make sure America never again becomes the sickest nation on earth,” according to Hilliard.

Means has questioned why babies are inoculated within the first few hours of being born, claiming the practice puts people on a “pharma treadmill for life.” She argued on Carlson’s show that newborns don’t need to be vaccinated with Hepatitis B shots, for example, because it’s “a sexually transmitted disease and IV drug-user disease, of course, which babies are not going to be exposed to.”

According to the CDC, infants are usually given a Hep B vaccine because if they get infected, they have a 90 percent chance of developing a lifelong, chronic infection. Additionally, many women are not symptomatic and don’t know they’ve been infected, so they could potentially pass along the infection at birth.

Her brother also claimed that the FDA was only testing drugs — not vaccines — through the double-blind studies, a golden standard in the medical field in which one group is given a placebo and the other is given the drug but neither the participants nor the researchers know which group received which tablet.

The HHS and its head repeated this claim last year when the department issued a new policy requiring placebo testing on all vaccines; the move essentially questions the safety of all longstanding vaccines. Many experts have pushed back against this allegation, stating that many childhood vaccines have been tested against a placebo, and warned of the dangers of adding a step to the vaccine approval process.

Part of the issue with medical research, the brother-sister duo argued to Rogan, is that it is studied in isolation rather than as a whole. That includes the impact of vaccines and its potential link to autism, she said, referencing another Kennedy buzzword.

“I bet that one vaccine probably isn’t causing autism but what about the 20 [vaccines] that [kids] are getting before 18?” Means asked Rogan.

The surgeon has advocated taking a holistic approach to medicine.

She’s repeatedly argued to study the body as a whole. Means told Bill Maher in November about America’s “disconnection crisis” in treatment.

“We’re disconnecting the body into 100 separate parts and not seeing it as a unified system,” she told the comedian. What humans have done to the environment is a reflection of what Americans have done to their bodies, Means added, citing pesticides and treatment of animals.

Means frequently claims that she believes America is suffering from a spiritual crisis.

“We cannot go on poisoning the earth without destroying our own health; we are one with nature,” she wrote in her most recent newsletter.

America’s current health crisis is “simply a reflection of a destroyed ecosystem and humans have become so powerful and so technologically advanced and so connected in the recent decades that we now actually do have the power to destroy our world and destroy our health,” according to Means.

Contraceptive medications “are literally shutting down the hormones in the female body that create this cyclical, life-giving nature of women,” according to Means. “The spraying of these pesticides, 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.”

She praised the pill as “liberation” for women, giving them the freedom to choose what to do, but also believes birth control pills are being “prescribed like candy,” Means told Carlson, arguing that they’ve also been used for treatment of acne and polycystic ovarian syndrome.

The surgeon believes Polycystic Ovary Syndrome — the leading cause of infertility in the U.S. — could be treated naturally with a change of diet rather than with drugs.

“I can think of no greater thing that we can do than have children and keep them healthy,” she told Carlson.