Fate of Trump Surgeon General Nominee in Limbo As Lawmakers Go After MAHA Movement

President Trump says he would consider pulling the nomination of his Surgeon General candidate Casey Means if she can’t get past resistance from the Senate over her positions on vaccines, microdosing psychedelic mushrooms, and other nontraditional health treatments championed by the Make America Healthy Again movement. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised objections over Dr. Means, a Stanford-trained doctor who did not complete her surgical residency and has an inactive, though current, license to practice medicine. “Well, we’re looking at a lot of different things. I don’t know how she’s doing in the nomination process. I’m more focused on Iran, but something like that would be possible. We have a lot of great candidates,” Mr. Trump said Sunday night when asked about the difficulty she is facing in the Senate. Dr. Means is well-known in the MAHA movement that faithfully backs Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A good friend of Mr. Kennedy herself, Dr. Means has a brother, Calley Means, also circles the Trump universe as a White House advisor and former food lobbyist.Mr. Kennedy has expressed strong support for the nominee, who was tapped in May 2025 for the post.Though not currently practicing medicine, Dr. Means completed four years of a five-year surgical residency in otolaryngology — head and neck surgery — at Oregon Health & Science University at Portland where she received an award for excellence before leaving the program in 2018 to open her own practice. She left her practice in 2020 to co-found a company that uses biofeedback tools on metabolic health to educate patients and improve outcomes. Despite being published in peer-reviewed journals, Dr. Means admits she is a controversial candidate because of her work challenging America’s health care, agriculture, and food industries and criticizing America’s pharmaceutical industry, which she says profits from disease management. Her support for holistic and functional approaches to medicine in addition to questioning Western reliance on pharmacology has made her the target of lawmakers and others who label her a “vaccine skeptic.” “She’s very squirrelly on the subject and there’s a reason for that,” said Senator Adam Schiff, who recently shared a lengthy video of his objections to her nomination. “It’s because RFK Jr himself has peddled the fiction that vaccines cause autism.”In her confirmation hearing last month, Dr. Means said she agrees that flu vaccines reduce mortality rates at the population-level, but she was criticized for suggesting that despite evidence otherwise, medical studies about the link between vaccine cocktails for children and autism are incomplete.The role of the U.S. surgeon general is to serve as the “nation’s doctor” by providing scientific information on how to improve health and reduce risk of illness and injury. As the top member of the Commissioned Corps for the U.S. Public Health Service, the public-facing post is responsible for issuing and communicating advisories, reports, and calls to action on critical public health issues.In his video, Mr. Schiff, who is not a doctor but also attended Stanford, blasted the MAHA movement overall, saying that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel recently suspended by a federal judge and which would closely coordinate with Dr. Means, is filled with individuals with “dubious medical knowledge or scientific credibility.” “Having another person as surgeon general who shares their skepticism of the evidence who shares their unwillingness to accept the evidence poses a real public health threat. Already because of the work of these anti-vaxxers in the Trump administration, measles is coming back in a big way so we’re not making America healthy again but we are making measles great again,” he said.President Trump’s surgeon general during the Covid outbreak in 2020, Dr. Jerome Adams, also said he does not think Dr. Means is qualified.“In the midst of a massive measles outbreak, America needs a surgeon general who can clearly stand behind vaccines,” Dr. Adams told CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday. “This isn’t personal or political … it’s about her not having the basic qualifications to do the job.”Supporters of Dr. Means, however, are most agitated by Senator Bill Cassidy, the Republican senator from Louisiana, who is a medical doctor and chairman of the Senate committee responsible for shepherding her nomination. Facing a primary opponent endorsed by the president, Julia Letlow, who supports Dr. Means, Dr. Cassidy has so far declined to schedule a vote. “Sen. Cassidy has voiced opposition to key parts of the MAHA agenda, despite strong support for it among his constituents,” MAHA Action posted on X over the weekend. “While the process stalls, Americans are being denied a Surgeon General we all know is qualified and will thrive in the role. We urge Sen. Cassidy to move this nomination forward and allow President Trump’s pick to be confirmed so she can begin her work helping Make America Healthy Again.”

Fate of Trump Surgeon General Nominee in Limbo As Lawmakers Go After MAHA Movement

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