Looking for a Surgeon General? Pick ME! Pick ME!

The nomination of Dr. Casey Means to be the country's next Surgeon General draws criticism from the MAHA base AND the medical establishment

Character Arnold Horshack from “Welcome Back Kotter”

I’m half joking. HALF joking. There are undoubtedly more qualified candidates out there than me. I just wouldn’t put Casey Means in that group.

From Wikipedia:

“The surgeon general of the United States is the operational head of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (PHSCC) and thus the leading spokesperson on matters of public health in the federal government of the United States. The surgeon general's office and staff are known as the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG), which is housed within the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health.

The U.S. surgeon general is nominated by the president of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. The surgeon general must be appointed from individuals who are members of the regular corps of the U.S. Public Health Service and have specialized training or significant experience in public health programs. However, there is no time requirement for membership in the Public Health Service before holding the office of the Surgeon General, and nominees traditionally were appointed as members of the Public Health Service and as surgeon general at the same time. “

and…

“Today, the surgeon general is usually selected from the civilian community, who aligns more closely with the president's political party. The office is not a particularly powerful one, and has little direct statutory impact on policy-making, but surgeons general are often vocal advocates of precedent-setting, far-sighted, unconventional, or even unpopular health policies.”

Who is Casey Means? Let’s go back to Wikipedia for the basic facts:

“She is the first daughter of Grady and Gayle Means. Grady served as an assistant to vice president Nelson Rockefeller, worked on health and human welfare issues at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and was a managing partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers.Her brother, Calley, is a former food industry lobbyist. Gayle died of pancreatic cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic, encouraging her children to resolve "broken health incentives" in the U.S.”

“Means graduated with honors from Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in human biology. In 2014, she graduated from the Stanford University School of Medicine. After medical school, she started a residency in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery of Oregon Health and Science University with the aim of becoming an ENT surgeon. Six months before the end of the five-year program, she dropped out of her surgical residency, due to anxiety and having become disillusioned with healthcare in the United States.”

Naomi Wolf, PhD, an outspoken critic of the pandemic response and Covid-19 shots raises issues around the nominee’s ties to the “Broligarchs” of Silicon Valley who, Wolf argues, have been relentlessly pursuing our health data to “digitize” our bodies. She writes:

“Casey Means is a creation, in effect, of Silicon Valley, for the purposes, too, I argue, of plundering our government data, and of rerouting US health policy, to align with the interests of Big Tech; especially in the booming realm of biometrics.”

“Casey Means is cofounder of Levels.com. That company’s business model involves securing your glucose levels and food tracking data. Casey Means has had an astonishing ride through the VC funding process, especially for a female founder, indeed for a founder with no track record at all in building and exiting successful digital companies listed in her bio. (Female founders receive less than 3% per cent of VC funding).”

Wolf warns that we ought to be cautious about the fact that the tech Broligarchs have “out of nowhere” embraced MAGA:

“Because I understood the data-harvesting value proposition of the Means siblings’ business models, I realized early on that their sudden self-representation as grassroots medical freedom activists was absurd. And when, within weeks, President Trump announced, standing alongside Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, a $500 billion joint venture in AI, “Stargate,” which would combine the forces of usually-competing entities Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Oracle and Softbank, I saw another warning sign.

I realized as I watched all this unfold, that while President Trump may believe that he has harnessed Silicon Valley, the real risk is that Silicon Valley has harnessed him.

The goal of the Broligarchs in suddenly out of nowhere embracing MAGA, was very clear. It was not just a predictable kowtowing to the new guy in charge; though that surely was an element. This embrace seemed mostly, to me, even before I learned of Musk’s time with our most precious data, what they call in VC land, “a data play.”

Read her essay here:

The Imaginary Casey Means

Dr. Robert Malone finds almost all of the complaints around Means’ appointment to be rather unhinged. He responded in this essay with a subtitle quoting the Rolling Stones: “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes, you get what you need.”

Dr. Casey Means, and the MAHA Controversy

Malone opens with a subsection titled, “Daddy, I want the mRNA “Vaccines” withdrawn, NOW…”

If Naomi Wolf went a bit too far in drawing connections between a young wellness influencer and billionaire data mongers, Malone, in my opinion, has went too far in painting those in the MAHA movement who have been waiting three decades or more for this time as whiny, impatient brats. Are they crying for lollipops? Or for a treatment with questionable efficacy and a harm signature that is still yet to be understood to no longer be used against an infection that no longer poses any real threats?

Malone believes that a lot of the blowback from the MAHA movement on social media is coming from fringe sources:

“Based on the large number of “low complexity” accounts (few followers, no blue check, recently created etc.), a substantial minority of the comments have the hallmarks of a bot campaign being staged to amplify division within the base. Some close to the topic assert that Pharma has set up war rooms assigned the objective of derailing Senate confirmation for the candidate, Dr. Casey Means. I also hear through my network that the Trump administration sees this as a crucial appointment and is ready to go to the mat to fight for Dr. Means’ confirmation.”

Sure, I could see how Pharma interests would be interested in derailing her appointment. And, I can also see how they would be thrilled if she were picked (see below).

Malone is basically saying, don’t believe the hype, its being stirred up by our enemy. Dr. Malone also is more in the loop than the rest of us. He’s tapped into a network that we aren’t.

In his essay Dr. Malone does take Naomi Wolf’s “a bit breathlessly hyperbolic for my taste” arguments more seriously than those from whiny mothers of vaccine injured children. I’ve read that subsection a few times, and I am not sure what his counter argument is, other than the fact that in his estimation we ought not to be too concerned about her company, “Levels” from going anywhere.

Is he right? I don’t know. Nobody does. These are just opinions. Malone finally concludes (emphasis his):

“Finally to this point, there is a curious failure among these rather loud and persistent voices to recognize that the political reality at this point is that any of those physicians who prominently questioned the safety, efficacy and bioethics of these mRNA-based product deployments are unlikely to be confirmed by this Senate at this time.”

My Thoughts

Any doctor who held the MAHA position on the shots publicly, he says, “are unlikely to be confirmed by this Senate at this time.”

Well, that may be true but we do have the biggest vaccine misinformation spreader at the head of the HHS. And, Dr. Bhattacharya, whose co-authored “Great Barrington Declaration” which openly challenged the HHS’s “lockdown until vaccination” policy is head of the National Institute for Health. These two men have held controversial, public opinions and are now wielding a ton of power. Are you really saying that the President has used up all his political capital and now the Senate won’t back a different doctor to be the SG, a position with almost no authority?

I don’t think so.

I think both Malone and Wolf are missing the point. The office of the Surgeon General “is not a particularly powerful one, and has little direct statutory impact on policy-making, but surgeons general are often vocal advocates of precedent-setting, far-sighted, unconventional, or even unpopular health policies.”

What is the harm in picking a more qualified candidate and picking another if the Senate doesn’t confirm the first one? Rinse and repeat. The Surgeon General has no role in policy-making. There isn’t any urgency to this appointment. This is a symbolic point the administration is making. By appointing a very smart, energetic well-intending doctor who hasn’t finished her training, MAHA is sending a clear message: we don’t really know what we are up against here. We are choosing the wrong symbol.

This battle will only be won once the majority of the 1.1 million doctors in this country change their mind about this technology and start to admit that they were duped by the sources they have trusted their whole careers.

There is little chance that these doctors will give any time of day to PSAs and demands coming from an HHS run by RFK Jr. and who now supports a doctor who hasn’t completed her training and Board Certification. That’s the way it works. As someone who interacts with the very body of doctors that need to come around on a daily basis, this was an enormous strategic blunder imo. Perhaps this is why Dr. Malone is a bit naive here.

In my estimation, Casey Means will have little problem getting confirmed. This is exactly the kind of appointment the Pharma complex was hoping for. Someone with opinions dangerous to their industry who has little power but can be used to undermine the MAHA initiatives. She will be the poster child of the kind of doctor that opposes the medical establishment. She’s young, she couldn’t hack residency and went off the deep end. What kind of person quits such a pursuit with the finish line right in front of them? Public health in this country is a travesty!

It’s not easy to do well enough at Stanford undergrad to get into Stanford medical school. It’s even harder to match in otorhinolaryngology (i.e. ENT). Residency is a beast. Huge number of hours with very little compensation. I give Casey Means the benefit of the doubt in that she could not complete her training because of a nervous breakdown and a realignment of priorities.

I can understand that completely. I nearly dropped out of medicine entirely during my internship in Internal Medicine because it was clear that of all the patients that I thought I was helping, few got better. In fact that is why I left my residency in Internal Medicine and switched into my present field, anesthesiology.

I was an older resident (six years older than most of my colleagues), and I had to put myself through medical school. I had to finish my training in order to repay a mountain of debt. I think it is safe to assume that Dr. Means did not have the same sorts of pressures. Quitting with six months to go would have never crossed my mind as a remote possibility in my reality.

The medical system is at a crossroads right now. If the system was objective we would pull the mRNA shots from any recommendations until a proper, CDC sanctioned dive into the data is done. The reason why this cannot happen overnight is that imposing radical new policy changes may work for a couple of years. But laws can change. We have to change the minds of highly trained doctors who have all been part of the system that Dr. Means officially abandoned.

That won’t happen from the outside. It has to be taken down from within.

While I was nowhere near as quick to understand what was going on in the first few months of 2021 as others were, I very soon changed my mind from “wait and see” to “holy shit—did you even look at the trial data? Yikes!”

Whenever I hear someone say they have changed their mind about something, my ears perk up. I am fascinated by someone who abandoned a long held belief because they saw something they had never seen. What was it?

In my experience with the Covid shots I have yet to encounter anyone who began with the opinion that they pose a serious risk and convert to a Covid shot enthusiast. It always goes the other way. Doctors who changed their mind are incredibly potent at changing the minds of their colleagues.

We don’t necessarily need someone who has been outspoken about the dangers of these shots from the jump. We need someone who has finished their training, has taken care of patients for a few decades and has come to a new understanding which they may have kept under wraps until the moment was right.

I refuse to believe that there isn’t a single doctor out there who doesn’t have a good understanding of what is happening but has remained under the radar for five years. Isn’t it worth looking first?

I wish Dr. Means all the luck with her businesses and books. And, she is not qualified to be the Surgeon General of the United States of America.

Mr. President, Secretary Kennedy, please DM me and I will send over my CV pronto.