President Donald Trump is considering pulling the plug on his bid to install a controversial MAHA influencer as the nation’s top doctor.
“Something like that would be possible,” the president said Sunday, responding to questions about withdrawing Casey Means’ nomination for surgeon general. “We have a lot of great candidates for that job.”
“We’re looking at a lot of different things, and I don’t know how she’s doing in the nomination process,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One, en route back to D.C. after spending the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “I’m more focused on Iran,” he added.
Trump nominated Means, a 38-year-old former physician and influencer-darling of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement, to serve as one of the nation’s top medical authorities in May last year.
She has since struggled to secure enough support to advance her nomination, facing scrutiny for not holding an active medical license and her relative lack of clinical experience, as well as her vaccine skepticism and potential for conflict of interest from her role as a wellness influencer.
Means faced an intense grilling at a Senate hearing in February. Even Republican officials appeared concerned by her hardline refusal to recommend parents vaccinate their children against flu and measles, and her claims there’s no “settled” evidence on the link between vaccines and autism.
Medical consensus, backed by over a dozen large-scale studies, suggests there is precisely zero link between vaccines and autism, per John Hopkins University.
Means, with every Democratic member of the Senate opposed to her nomination, would require the backing of every Republican senator to secure the post of Surgeon General.
GOP Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Bill Cassidy have all, since Means’s hearing in late February, declined to back her for the job, citing lingering concerns over whether she is up to the task.
Trump’s first Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who was appointed during the president’s first term, threw further sand in the gears with comments in a Sunday interview with the Washington Post.
“The role of surgeon general has centuries of precedent and requirements, and she doesn’t meet them,” he told the newspaper, noting that Means is not, at present, a licensed physician. “The irony would be the nation’s doctor wouldn’t even be in the corps as a doctor.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and Means for comment on this story. Trump spokesperson Kush Dusai previously described her as “a critical asset for President Trump’s push to Make America Healthy Again.”
