By Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a Thursday interview said President Trump’s new nominee for surgeon general turned away from modern medicine because “she was not curing patients.”
Casey Means, an ally of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, has come under scrutiny since Trump made her the surgeon general pick, as she never finished her residency and does not have an active medical license.
Kennedy defended Means during the interview Thursday on Fox News’s “Special Report.”
“She walked away from traditional medicine because she was not curing patients,” Kennedy said.
“She couldn’t get anybody within her profession to look at the nutrition contributions to illness, and she said, ‘If we’re really going to heal people, if we’re healers, we can’t just be making our life about billing new procedures,’” he told host Brett Baier.
Kennedy defended Trump’s pick for the role after pulling the nomination of Janette Nesheiwat, a physician and former Fox News contributor.
“We actually have to figure out new approaches to medicine, and that’s the kind of leadership that she’s going to bring to our country,” he said.
Kennedy’s former presidential running mate Nicole Shanahan and others have criticized Means’s nomination.
“Yes, it’s very strange. Doesn’t make any sense,” Shanahan wrote on the social platform X, responding to a post that expressed concern that Means, a graduate of Stanford Medical School, has “just about no clinical experience.”
“I was promised that if I supported RFK Jr. in his Senate confirmation that neither of these siblings would be working under HHS or in an appointment (and that people much more qualified would be),” Shanahan said. “I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on.”