Dr. Casey Means, and the MAHA Controversy
You can’t always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes, you get what you need.
| ROBERT W MALONE MD, MS MAY 12 |
Daddy, I want the mRNA “Vaccines” withdrawn, NOW!
One way to detect PsyWar propaganda campaigns is that the promoted narrative does not make sense. For example; “The nominated Surgeon General did not publicly condemn the COVID mRNA “vaccines”, and so is therefore not qualified.”
But in the US HHS system, the Surgeon General has nothing to do with regulatory affairs (FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has that job), or with recommending FDA authorized vaccines (CDC Director nominee Susan Monarez would have that responsibility).
To those who have been following the teapot tempest over the recent Surgeon General appointment that has come to a boil within the political base of the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement, I invite you to take a quiet moment to think about the broader politics of this with me. For those who are blissfully ignorant, you should consider and choose whether or not you want to take a dive into this particular teapot.
Many strong words have been written on “X” and across the social media niches frequented by the MAHA base regarding the recent appointment by President Trump of Dr. Casey Means as the replacement candidate for Surgeon General. 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.
Naomi Wolf is raising more substantive concerns about the Surgeon General nominee. She asserts that the true back story of concern here is about the undue influence of Silicon Valley “Broligarchs,” and the biometric tracking company Levels.com founded by Dr. Casey Means and capitalized by a handful of Broligarchs (currently valued at over 300 Million US dollars).
“Casey Means’ main credentials are that she is an entrepreneur in the health space, with a highly valued startup, and that she wrote, with her brother, a bestselling book, Good Energy.
Let us start with her tech startup, Levels.com. I will argue that her business is an empty storefront, a misleadingly-packaged void into which value has been pumped artificially by some of the most entrenched, corrupt interests in Silicon Valley.”
Naomi Wolf, “The Imaginary Casey Means”
Here is the essence of this argument- a bit breathlessly hyperbolic for my taste, but still, I think it is a significant contribution to the topic area;
Was it because Casey Means was taking a “fresh new approach” to health care, avoiding allopathic Rockefeller medicine, as she claims? And as a huge, multi-million-dollar PR campaign, sustained now for many months, seeks to spin the story?
Or was it to get a whole new line of biometric-harvesting products to be pushed by the White House and HHS — along with someone reliably to advance existing biotech VC interests and to corral medical data — but all of this repackaged with a benign, “MAHA” face in front of it?
Let’s drill into the value of Levels.com. It has 60,000 subscribers and has been in business for six years.
How does a startup with 10,000 subscribers a year, and no new technology, get a valuation of $313 million? Doesn’t it say something that the only two tech founders who are well-known in the MAHA movement, Nicole Shanahan and myself, are equally taken aback by Casey Means’ nomination?
Tech CEOs understand the red flag represented by a $313 million valuation for a company founded by someone with no tech experience, no successful exits, a company with few subscribers and no new technology, whose investors and founders include Google and Twitter and SpaceX and Andreessen Horowitz.
This graph below, from Crunchbase.com, is Levels.com’s growth over five years. The company had zero organic growth since shortly after it was launched in 2020. Indeed, growth was not only flat — it was declining, til the Means’ siblings were in the news.
How is this going to generate a valuation of $313 million? Why would it even generate new investment?
Unless…the co-founder, who happens to talk to trees, and whose X bio to this day reads, “Committed to awe” — has been put into place by Big Tech interests, who are also funding a costly PR campaign around her, so as to secure her nomination to serve as the next Surgeon General.
Related to this emerging story is that the 300M$ valuation company Levels did not actually develop the glucose monitoring device being used to collect the data, but rather uses the device developed and marketed by another company, Dexcom. As of March 2025, DexCom had a market cap of $27.88 Billion USD, making DexCom the world’s 734th most valuable company. Unfortunately for both DexCom and Levels.com, the FDA, having determined upon manufacturing site inspection that the DexCom device is adulterated, and has issued a dreaded 483 warning letter to DexCom for this adulteration.
Surprisingly, Wall Street is relatively unconcerned about this 483 adulteration letter, which was issued on March 04, 2025. That seems rather odd to me.
For those not closely following the mRNA vaccine story, myself and others assert that the presence of substantial DNA fragment contamination in these products also meets criteria for adulteration, and the manufacturers of these products should also have been issued 483 letters and those products should have been withdrawn from the market for that reason, if not for the (disputed) wide spectrum of product-associated adverse events including death.
For further information about adulteration and mRNA “vaccines”, please see the following:
| FDA Fails to Address DNA Adulteration Concerns |
| ROBERT W MALONE MD, MS·DECEMBER 15, 2023 |
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| Read full story |
Passions among the MAHA base are running high for a few reasons.
Many in the base are (understandably, IMO) quite angry that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA-based products have not been withdrawn from the market due to strong (un)safety signals and inverted risk/benefit profiles in virtually all age cohorts. There are nuanced divisions within MAHA supporters and HHS appointees on this topic; for example, new NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya believes that the risk/benefit ratio for some high-risk cohorts (including the elderly) supports continued dosing with these products, but not with others (children). Some identified with MAHA who remain outside of HHS at this time (such as myself) called for the products to be withdrawn from the market years ago, but this remains a minority position among the general electorate.
Others, such as key Secretary RFK Jr. presidential campaign funder and VP candidate Nicole Shanahan, have voiced more personal objections to both Dr. Means and her brother Calley serving in the Trump administration within HHS. Calley Means currently serves as an advisor to Secretary Kennedy within HHS as a Special Government Employee (SGE), akin to the Elon Musk SGE appointment. Nicole Shanahan had previously announced that she would also be serving as an advisor, but it appears that this appointment may have run into some sort of obstacle, perhaps due to the federal statutory conflict-of-interest restrictions on SGE service.
In the world of DC politics, use of words like “RFK very clearly lied to me” and “bred and raised Manchurian assets” to describe President Donald Trump’s appointments are usually restricted to grandstanding members of the opposition, such as AOC and Elizabeth Warren. I understand from a third party that Secretary Kennedy has generously offered to speak with Ms. Shanahan to better understand her concerns personally. Historically and notoriously, such language would disqualify the speaker or writer from any future role in Team Trump. WH COS Susie Wiles is known to be particularly sensitive to such.
Personally, I find this discussion particularly cringeworthy because of the appearance of influence peddling (see below).
Ms. Shanahan’s “Manchurian” comment seems to align with one promoted narrative that both Casey and Calley Means are not what they appear to be, but rather that their apparent rapid rise to prominence is the consequence of being guided and placed in these positions by some shadowy force acting on their behalf, with both the pharmaceutical industry and the CIA often being mentioned.
Rather than speculating about “bred and raised Manchurian assets”, if Ms. Shanahan and other prominent critics had raised concerns and provided details about Levels.com, then these concerns would have been more compelling.
Having personally experienced this tactic of delegitimization on an almost daily basis (such as “You worked for DARPA” – which is a promoted false narrative), I have a lot of empathy and understanding concerning how insidiously demoralizing and demeaning it can be to be unjustly and repeatedly attacked by persons deploying this smear tactic based merely on “intuition” unencumbered by actual evidence. So I freely admit to bias grounded in empathy in support of both the Means and others on the receiving end of this particular flavor of smear campaign.
Among the MAHA base, the predominant criticism has been that Dr. Means has not explicitly called for withdrawal of the mRNA-based COVID gene therapy tech-based “vaccines”. Irony abounds, as both the notoriously TDS-mad Huffington Post and NY Times consider Dr. Means an anti-vaxxer.
From the NY Times-
Is Dr. Means guilty of what corporate media frames as the crime of entertaining questions regarding the appropriateness of the current pediatric vaccine schedule, the sin of being a “vaccine skeptic”? Well, basically, yes.
Has Dr. Means met the required criteria of many within the MAHA base, and was the Surgeon General candidate one of the physicians who was early to call for withdrawal of the mRNA-based COVID gene therapy tech-based “vaccines” from the US market? No. But many, including most if not all physicians acting as self-appointed arbiters of purity on this topic were also not so pure themselves in this regard early on, when speaking out was to invite a wide range of media retaliation, blacklisting, censorship and to risk debanking.
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.
As to Dr. Means, my personal point of view is that the narrative that she is unqualified to serve as Surgeon General because of her failure to denounce the COVID mRNA “vaccine” products is not compelling. I am much more concerned about the issues surrounding her company Levels.com and her ties to Silicon Valley Oligarchs. However, this is something that the army of conflict-of-interest attorneys at HHS will have to grapple with; it is above my pay grade.
In addition to these substantive issues relating to ties to Silicon Valley and medical data harvesting, Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair has also raised questions concerning Dr. Means explanation of her decision to leave her surgical residency. Of course, the decision to walk away from 18+ years of your life invested in training would bring many to tears, and there are serious overtones of a Trump administration hit piece in this Vanity Fair article.
Donald Trump’s new nominee to be the next surgeon general has said she walked away from a promising career in the medical establishment. Some fellow residents and a former department chairman say the situation was more complicated.
-Katherine Eban; “She Was Tearful About It”: The Nuances of Casey Means’s Medical Exit and Antiestablishment Origins
All of this reeks of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal. The business model of Levels.com is also related to aspects of the “Stargate” initiative announced on the first day of the Trump Presidency.
In my opinion, it is likely that the issues surrounding Levels.com will compromise the Senate confirmation of Casey Means as Surgeon General.
Returning to Naomi Wolfe’s recent essay;
Look at who came in as founders: “Josh Clemente (SpaceX, Hyperloop), Sam Corcos (CarDash, YC), David Flinner (Google), and Andrew Conner (Google) founded Levels to solve the metabolic health crisis.”
So Casey Means’ cofounders are….Twitter and SpaceX and Google.
Was it because Casey Means was taking a “fresh new approach” to health care, avoiding allopathic Rockefeller medicine, as she claims? And as a huge, multi-million-dollar PR campaign, sustained now for many months, seeks to spin the story?
Or was it to get a whole new line of biometric-harvesting products to be pushed by the White House and HHS — along with someone reliably to advance existing biotech VC interests and to corral medical data — but all of this repackaged with a benign, “MAHA” face in front of it?
Naomi Wolf, “The Imaginary Casey Means”
Having covered the basic issues driving this particular tempest, let’s step back and take a moment to consider the larger context within which these are playing out.
Through most of its lifespan, the center-right populist/constitutional conservative movement that coalesced around President Trump’s inspired political framing of “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) did not include the policy positions now embodied in the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) coalition.
Furthermore, while MAGA originates from libertarian, Tea Party, and other center-right political movements, the MAHA movement comes from the left, particularly from the modern inheritors of the 70s health food and environmentalism movements.
For more on this, please see the following:
MAHA has historically focused more on nutrition and food purity than on vaccine skepticism. The weaponized term “anti-vaccine” has typically been associated with Children’s Health Defense, the non-profit for which Secretary Kennedy previously served as Board Chairperson, and with Del Bigtree’s “Informed Consent Action Network” (ICAN). Bigtree served as communications director for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Although the MAHA movement included aspects of vaccine skepticism, it was not an “anti-vaccine” populist movement. I have previously made the case that the RFK jr presidential campaign adroitly assimilated rather than created the MAHA movement and coalition, and that this astute political move allowed Bobby to pivot away from the promoted narrative that he is an “anti-vaxxer”, which was effectively weaponized against him during his campaign for both the Democratic nomination and then as an independent candidate.
My sense is that most objective outsiders would conclude that Calley and Casey Means have played a key role in defining and coalescing the coalition now known as MAHA, both via their book “GOOD ENERGY: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health” and through their social media and high profile interviews. The MAHA political coalition includes many who are skeptical of the currently expanded, CDC-endorsed pediatric vaccine schedule. But it also includes a wide range of issues and voters that are more closely aligned with food safety, nutrition, Sierra Club, ‘Earth First” and Burning Man. Movements that used to be referred to by terms such as “granolaheads” and “tree huggers”. The irony here being that Casey Means, Nicole Shanahan and to a significant extent Secretary Kennedy himself all have roots in these political initiatives.
The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., significantly impacted the 2024 election for Donald Trump. The political calculus of merging of MAGA and MAHA during the 2024 election of President Trump was that of a “big tent” strategy. By assimilating MAHA into the Trump campaign, a fraction of the Democratic party base was split off and merged into the Trump coalition. Kennedy, who had suspended his own campaign for president, endorsed Trump and launched the MAHA Alliance Super PAC to mobilize undecided voters, particularly younger and female voters who were generally anti-vaxxers and concerned about reproductive rights. This endorsement and the subsequent PAC efforts aimed to sway these voters by promoting health-focused policies and a message of wellness, which was seen as a strategic pivot for Trump to appeal to a broader demographic.
The MAHA movement targeted the 2-5% of undecided voters in swing states, using ad campaigns, voter mobilization efforts, and social media algorithms to spread a message about health rather than politics. This strategy was part of a broader effort to secure Trump’s victory, as the PAC aimed to raise $3.5 million by Election Day 2024 to support Trump’s re-election campaign.
Trump ultimately won the 2024 presidential election with 312 electoral votes, defeating Kamala Harris, who received 226 electoral votes. Trump also won the national popular vote with a plurality of 49.8%, making him the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004. The MAHA movement played a crucial role in mobilizing undecided voters and contributing to Trump’s victory in swing states.
Whether or not Dr. Casey Means will be confirmed by the Senate for the position of Surgeon General, whether her public statements concerning her leaving a Surgical residency were fully transparent, and whether her role and the overall business model of her company, Levels.com, are on the up and up will now be examined in depth.
However, as far as I am concerned, the primary effect of the indignation and umbrage concerning whatever her position is on the COVID mRNA “vaccine” products will be to fracture the “Big Tent” coalition formed by the merger of MAHA and MAGA movements. This internal fighting poses a political threat to achieving the objectives of both MAHA and MAGA, particularly in light of the upcoming midterm elections. This may be why I am seeing many bot accounts acting to amplify and drive wedges into these divisions.
Focus on the signal, not the noise.
I suggest that all concerned should ask themselves the following:
Do you support the MAHA objectives of the President? Are your actions advancing or hindering those objectives? Or are your actions helping those who seek to hinder and obstruct the ability of the President and his team to achieve those objectives?
Politics is complicated, and the general public is easily manipulated and distracted. We need to focus on the objectives, avoid short-term distractions and noise.
Once again quoting the timeless wisdom of the Rolling Stones:
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime
You’ll find
You get what you need
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
I also suggest that throwing temper tantrums because your personal top issue- no matter how valid- is not being achieved as rapidly as you want, can and will be exploited by others who oppose your interests.
And in terms of integrity, it is worth also keeping the following in mind-
When a donor to a political campaign seeks to gain promises from a political candidate in exchange for their contribution, this is commonly referred to as influence peddling or, in more severe cases, as a form of political corruption or bribery. When a powerful person withholds support from a candidate to extract specific promises, this is also influence peddling. If powerful people are doing this to kill or support MAHA or MAGA goals and objectives, it is still influence peddling.
John 8.7
Jesus went unto the mount of Olives. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them. And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.