Robert F. Kennedy

Calley Means is out of the White House; Casey Means misses Senate hearing

health, MAHA, means, Robert F. Kennedy / Mike M. / October 31, 2025

In a statement Thursday, government watchdog Public Citizen cheered the news of his departure.

“The Trump Administration has wildly abused the Special Government Employee designation to shoehorn powerful people into official jobs in a way that allowed them to evade financial transparency and anti-corruption restraints,” Public Citizen Democracy Advocate Jon Golinger said. “The clock ran out on Mr. Means, and we’re glad he finally resigned.”

“Charlatan”

Casey has a background in actual medicine, with a degree from Stanford Medical School, but she dropped out of her residency, holds no active medical license or board certification, and has gone all in on “functional” medicine, which is an ill-defined form of alternative medicine. She co-founded a company called Levels, which promotes intensive health tracking, including continuous blood glucose monitoring for people who don’t have prediabetes or diabetes. (Another Levels co-founder is Sam Corcos, now the chief information officer for the Department of the Treasury, who, as The New Yorker reported, led the effort to dismantle the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.)

Casey and Calley Means made a name for themselves among the MAHA crowd with their 2024 book Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. The book encourages health-conscious readers to avoid processed foods, seed oils, fragrances, a variety of home care products, fluoride, unfiltered water, bananas (when eaten alone), receipt paper, and birth control pills. It includes a chapter titled “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor.”

Health experts have sharply criticized her nomination to the role of surgeon general. The health network Defend Public Health released a statement Thursday urging lawmakers to reject her “quackery.”

“The US Surgeon General is the leading US government voice on public health issues,” said DPH member and physician Oni Blackstock, an HIV expert and former assistant commissioner at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “That person must be someone Americans can trust to give credible advice based on solid science and real data, not a charlatan who specializes in selling expensive, unproven tests and treatments.”

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Anti-vaccine group founded by RFK Jr. sues RFK Jr. over vaccine task force

CDC, children's health defense, health, HHS, Robert F. Kennedy, vaccines / 9u50fv / July 24, 2025

Now that Kennedy has moved on to politics, stepping down from his role at Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and joining the Trump administration, CHD has not let go of the issue.

Ray Flores, senior outside counsel to CHD, filed the lawsuit, which is being funded by CHD. In it, Flores notes that on March 15, 2025, he sent Kennedy a 60-day notice about the task force issue, and Kennedy did not respond.

Overall, the lawsuit contains anti-vaccine talking points and false claims, such as that childhood vaccines have not gone through safety testing (they have). Flores justifies the lawsuit saying that, without the task force, he “and his family can’t make informed decisions in light of the onslaught of current and seemingly never-ending outbreaks.”

In a social media post from CHD on Tuesday, Flores criticized Kennedy directly. “Why is he not dealing with vaccines? This is not the Bobby we know,” he said in the posted video. “Is he being held captive in the swamp? And it kind of feels that way sometimes, doesn’t it?”

It remains unclear why Kennedy has not set up the task force. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

Otherwise, Kennedy has not shied from unilaterally rolling back access to vaccines and continuing to spread anti-vaccine misinformation as the country’s top health official. His hand-selected vaccine advisory committee has already announced its intention to question the entire childhood vaccine schedule.

Potential explanations

However, there is one clear detail that could potentially explain Kennedy’s delay. The 1986 law that sets up the task force is specific about who should be on it. The task force “shall consist of the Director of the National Institutes of Health, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and the Director of the Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention],” the law reads. Currently, the CDC has no director.

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CDC can no longer help prevent lead poisoning in children, state officials say

applesauce, CDC, health, lead, Robert F. Kennedy / Mike M. / May 23, 2025

Amid the brutal cuts across the federal government under the Trump administration, perhaps one of the most gutting is the loss of experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who respond to lead poisoning in children.

On April 1, the staff of the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was terminated as part of the agency’s reduction in force, according to NPR. The staff included epidemiologists, statisticians, and advisors who specialized in lead exposures and responses.

The cuts were immediately consequential to health officials in Milwaukee, who are currently dealing with a lead exposure crisis in public schools. Six schools have had to close, displacing 1,800 students. In April, the city requested help from the CDC’s lead experts, but the request was denied—there was no one left to help.

In a Congressional hearing this week, US health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told lawmakers, “We have a team in Milwaukee.”

But Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis told NPR that this is false. “There is no team in Milwaukee,” he said. “We had a single [federal] staff person come to Milwaukee for a brief period to help validate a machine, but that was separate from the formal request that we had for a small team to actually come to Milwaukee for our Milwaukee Public Schools investigation and ongoing support there.”

Kennedy has also previously told lawmakers that lead experts at the CDC who were terminated would be rehired. But that statement was also false. The health department’s own communications team told ABC that the lead experts would not be reinstated.

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