We have a new Surgeon General nominee, Casey Means, a health influencer and former doctor who replaces Janette Nesheiwat, an urgent care doctor and Fox News host, as the nominee.
Dr. Nesheiwat was suddenly reassigned to help RKF Jr., the erstwhile HHS secretary, in other ways, because she was criticized by Laura Loomer (who apparently also doesn’t like Casey Means) or because it was uncovered that she (Dr. Nesheiwat) had exaggerated some of her credentials.
Or both.
It has been reported that Nesheiwat sometimes claimed that she had graduated from the University of Arkansas School of Medicine (which she doesn’t appear to have attended) instead of from the American University of the Caribbean (which she did apparently attend and from which she graduated). She appears to have hinted she was doubly board-certified in both Family Medicine (reportedly true) and Emergency Medicine (reportedly not true). She claims board certification from something called the American Academy of Urgent Care Medicine, which exists but isn’t an “accredited” board that is part of the American Board of Medical Specialties, the only boards that “count” in the pantheon of medical boards that matter.
Dizzying. Not descending to the level of George Santos, the ace ex-Republican congressman who was convicted, sentenced to seven years, and is about to be jailed — but still disappointing.
Casey Means, on the other hand, is said to have graduated from Stanford Medical School, which is pretty impressive, and did four and a half years of a five year quite rigorous Head and Neck Surgery residency at the Oregon Health & Science University, also a credible place — but let her medical license lapse, so she cannot technically refer to herself as “Doctor”. She made her living as a tech entrepreneur, as the cofounder of a company that tracks health information through devices, and as an author and an influencer.
Both Means and Nesheiwat are related to someone close to RFK or the White House. And this is Washington, not Rhode Island!
Turns out there are lots of Kennedy’s MAHA people who don’t like Casey Means either. Apparently, both nominees aren’t anti-vaccine enough. One of RFK’s supporters and his vice-presidential running mate and funder wrote that Means was “bred and raised by Manchurian assets” who are using her to control Kennedy himself.
Jumping Jewish Space Lasers!
Help! All this gives me such a headache! Almost none of these silly details matter. But these nominations and the tiny controversies they have created distracts some of us from what does matter – which is the importance of public health and a legitimate, unself-interested process to bring all Americans equal and optimal health.
For the record, vaccines work. They work best when the bulk of the population is vaccinated. They don’t cause autism. They are well tested and quite safe but sometimes over-recommended, in part because we have a for-profit vaccine industry that pushes profits before the public’s health and has sometimes co-opted parts of the scientific establishment, so some skepticism is legitimate. Masks work too. Not everyone who disagrees with you is your enemy. Rational people can reasonably disagree about public policy.
The Surgeon General has almost no power. Technically, the Surgeon General is in charge of the US Public Health Service but practically has little ability to make decisions that can improve the public’s health. The people with that kind of power include the Secretary of HHS, the Assistant Secretary for Health, the Director of CDC, and the Director of CMS – but all of those people depend on appropriations from Congress, without which they can’t accomplish much. (No one is in actual charge of hospitals, where 40 percent of our public health care dollars are spent on health care. No one is in charge of medical and nursing schools, where our health professionals are trained. Or of figuring out how many health professionals we need — and no one is in charge of getting those health professionals trained and deployed to where they are needed. So we have a mess, instead of a health care system.)
The Surgeon General has a staff and a budget of about a million dollars. The Surgeon General gets a very nice uniform and gets to write reports, some of which have been quite important and influential, and gets to travel around the country, giving speeches and keeping the public and health professionals focused on what matters in public health and health care. I’ve had the honor of meeting and knowing a couple of previous Surgeons General: they have been dignified, honorable people from both political parties, committed to the public’s health.
So why does any of this matter? It matters because the Surgeon General represents the integrity of our health care enterprise, and thus the integrity of our public life.
It’s crazy we have let ourselves be besmirched by this process. The Surgeon General needs to be a real doctor, not just someone who plays a doctor on TV, someone who their colleagues and the public can both respect. It’s our public life, our collective dignity and our sense of self respect that is on the block, and it’s crazy that no one has yet stood up and said loudly and clearly that we are better people, and a better nation, than this.