Latest news with #STAT
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Health
- Boston Globe
mRNA, once lauded as a scientific marvel, is now a government target
Advertisement On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed it was canceling 'The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested, and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns from the public,' HHS communications director Andrew Nixon said of the Moderna contracts. The White House did not respond to STAT's request for comment. Moderna, which built its business on mRNA and Advertisement 'mRNA vaccines funded by Operation Warp Speed were essential to ending the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing an estimated 20 million deaths worldwide, including more than 1 million in the United States,' Moderna told STAT. 'The efficacy and safety profile has been confirmed in over 2.5 billion people.' Pfizer, Moderna's mRNA COVID-19 vaccine rival, also defended the technology. CEO Albert Bourla Ending the Moderna contracts is the latest in a series of events signaling the administration's growing disdain for mRNA and COVID-19 vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration Still, in a partial victory for Moderna, the FDA on Friday Some of the attacks levied at mRNA are about the technology itself, while others stem from general vaccine skepticism and frustrations with vaccine mandates during COVID. But the impact is the same: Waning political support of mRNA is leading to Advertisement 'We were on the right avenue to really enhance our preparedness for the next pandemic, and we literally just killed it,' said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Osterholm has no financial ties to the mRNA industry. There are signs that distrust of mRNA extends beyond COVID shots. After Oracle founder Larry Ellison said the Trump administration's $500 billion investment in AI could lead to personalized mRNA cancer therapies, various anti-vaccine Trump supporters The opposition to mRNA could spook companies and stifle innovation on treatments for a wide range of life-threatening conditions. Novel cancer vaccines, gene-editing therapies, and rare disease medicines rely on mRNA. The cutting-edge CRISPR therapy used to edit out a genetic mutation causing 'What this means is that China is going to take over RNA therapeutics and RNA research and the United States is going to fall behind,' said Drew Weissman, a Billions of doses of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide, allowing them to be among the Advertisement Much of the backlash against mRNA shots rests on the false idea that the vaccines can cause long-term organ damage or even alter a person's DNA. However, This belief, combined with more general vaccine skepticism, has a strong champion in Kennedy, who has spread misinformation about mRNA in his books and through the anti-vaccine nonprofit he founded. 'As this book goes to press, the campaign to force unsafe COVID vaccines into children's bodies is reaching its peak,' he wrote in 'The Real Anthony Fauci,' his 2021 book about the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 'We can jettison this insanity if enough people refuse to participate in a new apartheid based upon forced medical procedures.' Despite evidence to the contrary, Kennedy has asserted in his books that mRNA COVID vaccines killed more people than they saved, and caused more death and injury than they averted in teenagers. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaks after his swearing-in as Secretary of Health and Human Services, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Feb. 13. ERIC LEE/NYT While he tried to distance himself from his past comments in order to be confirmed by the Senate, Kennedy has since made changes to vaccine policy and practice. Colleagues like NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya seem to have suspicions of mRNA, too. Advertisement Last month, Bhattacharya was unenthusiastic about the technology, saying in an interview with Manufacturers and researchers have been trying to address the skepticism of mRNA via But the odds are stacked against them. Kennedy has elevated fellow leaders in the vaccine-critical movement into the nation's consciousness. Longtime confidante Stefanie Spear, now principal deputy chief of staff at HHS, helped Kennedy start a blog that promoted misleading information about vaccines. Children's Health Defense CEO Mary Holland routinely attends Kennedy's events, as does Del Bigtree, who stepped down from the nonprofit group MAHA Action to pursue more vaccine-focused advocacy. Others, like the physician-blogger Peter McCullough — credited by some with kickstarting the anti-COVID-vaccine era — and vaccine injury attorney Aaron Siri, were recently invited by like-minded senators to testify before Congress. In that hearing, they spread vaccine skepticism on a larger platform, arguing that crucial safety information has been kept from the public. Both men have a stake in that idea. Advertisement Siri runs a law firm almost entirely devoted to litigating vaccine injury claims. He and Kennedy previously worked together on such cases. McCullough is a prolific mRNA critic on social media and in his newsletter. He also serves as chief scientific officer of alternative-health care group The Wellness Company, which sells products like an unproven 'Spike Detox' supplement for long COVID, and as head of the McCullough Foundation, which funds a variety of projects by vaccine skeptics. McCullough told STAT he believes mRNA vaccines are not safe, and that his foundation is actively pushing for policies restricting their use. HHS staff and Kennedy reach out to him from time to time, he said. McCullough noted he's been most involved with Idaho's 'We talked to some very senior officials, and they said one of the reasons you need to be here is because of the state activity,' Alspach said. 'They specifically cited Idaho.' By now, the anti-mRNA sentiment has spread far beyond Idaho. Republican lawmakers in Illinois, New York, and Texas, among others, have introduced their own bills targeting mRNA vaccines and, in some cases, the mRNA platform more broadly. Several bills push to ban the technology altogether, while others are designed to change rules for vaccinated blood donors, or impose fines on providers who give mRNA shots. Conservative Most of the bills are unlikely to gain traction; the Texas bill has made it the furthest, with the state senate 'It's kind of breathtaking how the field has shifted and done almost a 180, really,' said Kate Broderick, geneticist and chief innovation officer at mRNA manufacturer Maravai LifeSciences. 'During COVID, there was so much support, and it's really quite frightening, frankly, the pivot that's happened in a relatively short period of time.' Alspach said the political backlash against mRNA is a uniquely American phenomenon. If the US government stops investing in the technology, he said, American patients will rely on research coming out of other countries on mRNA-based gene therapies, cancer treatments, and vaccines. 'This is the only place in the world where this is happening,' Alspach said. 'Other countries are rolling out the red carpet for this technology.' The group has found it difficult to fend off attacks against the technology, as many critiques are vague or wrapped in general resentment about the handling of the COVID pandemic. The word 'mRNA' makes people think about vaccine mandates, school closures, and the theory that COVID originated in a lab, said mRNA researcher Jeff Coller, a co-founder of the Alliance for mRNA Medicines. The mRNA vaccines' association with lingering COVID resentment was on full display at the congressional hearing that featured McCullough and Siri. The hearing, hosted by the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs' investigations subcommittee, was titled, 'The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies: How Health Officials Downplayed and Hid Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Associated with the COVID-19 Vaccines.' Subcommittee chairman Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and other conservative lawmakers spent several hours rehashing arguments born in the pandemic — against lockdowns, masks, mandates, and more — now with added confidence and new data sources. They cited reports from vaccine-critical groups, and said there was no evidence COVID vaccines saved lives. ( Broderick said so far, his alliance has not had luck reaching anyone in the administration to directly express its concerns. The goal is to ask Kennedy, Bhattacharya, and others questioning the safety of the mRNA platform about their specific worries. 'What we would really love to do is say, can we have a dialogue about that?' Broderick said. 'What can we do together as a scientific community to allay any concerns or provide you with the data to support our standpoint?'
Boston Globe
28-05-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
HHS cancels nearly $600 million Moderna contract on vaccines for flu pandemics
Advertisement No other flu vaccine production approach can produce doses with the speed of the messenger RNA platform used by Moderna and other companies that work with mRNA. But the vaccine platform is viewed with deep suspicion by health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his political base. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Moderna had conducted a Phase 1/2 clinical trial of its H5N1 vaccine, and was optimistic about the results it was seeing, the company said in a statement. 'While the termination of funding from HHS adds uncertainty, we are pleased by the robust immune response and safety profile observed in this interim analysis of the Phase 1/2 study of our H5 avian flu vaccine and we will explore alternative paths forward for the program,' said CEO Stéphane Bancel. 'These clinical data in pandemic influenza underscore the critical role mRNA technology has played as a countermeasure to emerging health threats.' Advertisement STAT has reached out to HHS to ask for its rationale for cutting the program. The funding, granted to the company by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, an HHS agency, was aimed at allowing the company to test and license a potential pandemic flu vaccine in advance. The goal of such funding — which BARDA has given to other flu vaccine manufacturers in the past — is to produce safety and immunogenicity data, and to license a prototype would be able to update the vaccine to target a particular new strain if a pandemic started; the vaccine could then be raced into distribution using the Food and Drug Administration's strain change rule — the approach the agency uses to approve changes to the annual flu shot. Experts who have worked in the pandemic preparedness field for years were dismayed by the development. 'In a rapidly expanding pandemic, time matters. … The sooner the population is protected from a lethal virus the more lives that will be saved. Of its many features, what mRNA technology provided most is speed,' said Bruce Gellin, a former director of the National Vaccine Program Office in the Bush and Obama administrations. 'If we lose our capability to respond as quickly as we can, we will sadly be able to calculate those who died because we made a decision that speed wasn't important.'
Vox
26-05-2025
- Health
- Vox
Does medicine have an over-diagnosis problem?
covers health for Vox, guiding readers through the emerging opportunities and challenges in improving our health. He has reported on health policy for more than 10 years, writing for Governing magazine, Talking Points Memo, and STAT before joining Vox in 2017. A new book argues doctors are too quickly and too confidently diagnosing their patients with too many medical problems. Corbis via Getty Images Patients in the 21st century are pretty lucky. Medical science and technology have advanced so much that we can diagnose many thousands of distinct conditions, and we can even take genetic tests that scour our DNA for signs of a disease that may not materialize for decades — offering us a peek into our own future. And with these advances, we are being diagnosed more and more. The number of people diagnosed with chronic health conditions and mental health disorders is at an all-time high — at least partly, most experts agree, because we have simply catalogued more diseases to catch. Yet we are also increasingly anxious, anxious about our health — even anxious that we're too anxious about our health. Our ability now to understand our bodies and put a name on what's wrong with them does not always provide comfort; instead, it can create new fears and impose new constraints on us. Some health care leaders, including Donald Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., argue that we are becoming over-medicalized — too ready to take a pill for something, just for the sake of taking something. The reality is nuanced because medicine is, to put it mildly, complicated. But we should in fact be careful about doling out diagnoses, says Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan, an Irish neurologist and the author of a new book, The Age of Diagnosis: How Our Obsession With Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker. In her book, O'Sullivan argues that our eagerness to diagnose, preemptively screen, and otherwise push these new tools to their limits is creating problems that deserve to be taken more seriously. She describes mutually reinforcing trends — the patient's insistence on certainty and the doctor's desire to avoid being blamed for missing something — that are driving clinical practice toward overdiagnosis. The phenomenon is even leading to more instances of doctors diagnosing certain cancers by 50 percent or more, due to the availability of new imaging tech that can detect even minuscule traces of abnormal cells. Overdiagnosis can cause real harm. And so O'Sullivan advocates for 'slow medicine,' in which doctors and patients take time to develop a relationship, monitor symptoms, and take a great deal of care before naming a condition — an approach that may sound quaint in an era of rapid-testing but something she says is actually more in tune with the reality that diagnosis is partly an art. 'Most diagnoses come with a huge amount of uncertainty. That covers asthma, diabetes, cancer, autism. Diagnosis is a clinical skill,' she told me in a recent interview. 'Now, the difficulty, I think, with modern medicine is a lot of people don't understand that and that they feel that the test — the blood test or the brain scan — makes the diagnosis, when actually a diagnosis is made on understanding the story in the context of the tests that are done.' There is a tension here. Slowing down could, at least in theory, risk missing an aggressive disease early at the most crucial time — when it can still be treated. And in the United States, simply getting a doctor's appointment can be more challenging than it should be. Each individual case is unique, O'Sullivan acknowledges, which is why a relationship with your own primary care doctor is so important. But she argues that, on the whole, doctors have erred too far in the other direction, toward diagnosing conditions too quickly and too confidently and creating a different set of problems for patients. During our conversation, we spoke about how to balance our tremendous new technological abilities with a more measured approach to clinical practice and how she would respond to critics who argue her advice would lead to people's health problems being missed. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. First, let's clarify something basic. What do you mean by overdiagnosis? How do you define it? I think of overdiagnosis as measuring the point at which a medical diagnosis ceases to be useful. A diagnosis may be right or it may be wrong, but it isn't always beneficial in a certain situation. Overdiagnosis is trying to ask when a diagnosis is genuinely a useful way of conceptualizing someone's difficulties, and when it is not. The first chapter is about Huntington's disease. Why did you start there? There's a genetic test available for Huntington's disease. If you happen to have the gene for Huntington's disease, you are destined to get Huntington's if you live long enough. If you have the genetic test, you can find out ahead of time that you have that at some point in your future. I needed people to understand the power of a diagnosis to make you sick even when you actually don't have much physically wrong with you. I tell the story of a patient named Valentina, who didn't have the gene but believed that she did because of her family history. Because of her strong belief that she had the gene, she developed all the symptoms. When we take on a medical label, when we are told that we are sick in some way, we inadvertently search ourselves for the symptoms and signs of the label that we've been given. Our bodies are very noisy engines. There's all sorts of things to notice if you are given reason to notice. The Huntington's disease community is in this incredible situation where they have the opportunity to find out they have a diagnosis 20 years before the disease starts. And in most countries, only 10 percent to 20 percent of people actually have the genetic test that will advise them of the disease. They do that because they are a community who has given a great deal of thought to what it's like to live with the label of an impending disease. Once you discover you have a positive test, it completely changes your relationship with your body. It changes how you think about your health. And once you know, you can't unknow. I spoke to loads of people with Huntington's, and they all said the same thing: that living with the hope that you are negative and that everything is okay is a way better life than living with the knowledge that you're positive and waiting for the disease to start. One of the most interesting themes in the book is this idea that people want and have come to expect concrete answers from modern medicine. Black or white: You have a disease or you don't. But you cover chronic Lyme disease, long COVID, and autism, these conditions where the boundaries are fuzzier. What problems does that create? Most diagnoses come with a huge amount of uncertainty. That covers asthma, diabetes, cancer, autism. Diagnosis is a clinical skill. It requires a good clinician to be able to put the patient's story in the context of tests and findings. Now, the difficulty, I think, with modern medicine is a lot of people don't understand that and that they feel that the test makes the diagnosis, the blood test or the brain scan, when actually a diagnosis is made on understanding the story in the context of the tests that are done. That means that diagnosis is hugely subjective. I hear a lot of stories of people going to different doctors who said I didn't have a diagnosis, but then the 11th doctor said I did have it. There is an inherent subjectivity that doctors will manage differently. I'm a doctor in a highly specialized center, and I deliberately err on the side of slight underdiagnosis. I do that because I'm aware that when I make a diagnosis of a brain disease, I am changing that person's future forever. I'm not just changing their relationship with their body. I'm also changing their mortgage payments, their insurance, their confidence in themselves, their ability to get health insurance. I'm changing their finances, their practical future. I'm changing their ability to drive. There's so many things that come with the diagnosis that people don't think about. What many, many doctors do is they err on the side of overdiagnosis because that['s an easier place for a doctor to be. Because you're never going to come back to me and say, 'Listen, I don't really believe I had asthma when I was a child.' You'll say, 'Well, listen, I had it. You treated it and now I'm better.' It protects us against someone coming back and saying we missed something. I came into this book thinking that something like cancer would very much be more of a yes or no. You either have it or you don't. And if you do, you really would want to know about it — as soon as possible. And yet, after reading your book, I felt like you had complicated that story. How do we risk overdiagnosing cancer? Within the medical community, this has been well-known for a long time, but it just doesn't leak into the general conversation. The bottom line is if you screen healthy people for an illness, any illness, be it cancer or high blood pressure, diabetes, then you will be picking up borderline cases and overtreating them. In the case of cancer, I try to remind people we've only had MRI scans in regular clinical use in doctors' offices since the 1990s. They've only been as good as they are now in the last 10 years, as sensitive at picking up things. As we get these newer tests, we're finally seeing inside the healthy body of people. What we find when we screen people for things like cancer is we find abnormal cells. But not all abnormal cells go into cancer. Lots of people live out their lives having these abnormal cells. They never spread. They never do anything. They never grow. They would never threaten health. But our difficulty as doctors is because we're so new to finding all these irregular abnormalities that when we find them, we don't know which ones will turn into malignant cancers and which ones won't. So what we do is we treat them all as if they will inevitably turn into malignant cancers. One Cochrane Review estimated that if you screen 2,000 women for breast cancer, you will save one woman's life from breast cancer and treat 10 women for breast cancer who never needed to be treated. I think sometimes we're very in love with all of our access to screening tests and scans and health checks. A lot of that care is not only unnecessary, but actually doing us harm. One estimated that if you screen 2,000 women for breast cancer, you will save one woman's life from breast cancer and treat 10 women for breast cancer who never needed to be treated. Obviously being able to better more precisely diagnose conditions and to test samples at a genetic level represents advancement in science and an improvement in our understanding of our own body. How do we encourage that kind of development while mitigating the problems that you're writing about? I work with people who've got rare brain diseases. The advancement in genetics and the ability to diagnose rare genetic conditions is amazing. I don't want to in any way detract from what a phenomenal kind of medical advancement that is. I have no doubt that going forward in 20, 30, 40 years, it will continue contributing to science and to medicine in very positive ways. How to talk to your doctor about 'slow' medicine O'Sullivan's book is not a self-help guide, but after reading it, it's easy to come up with some strategies that could help each of us bring a 'slow-medicine' sensibility to our next doctor's appointment and potentially avoid overdiagnosis. Such as: • Set expectations with your doctor. Make clear that you don't want to be quick to judgment or treatment. • Press your doctor to get a better sense of how confident they are in a diagnosis, what could change their mind, what additional steps could be taken to double-check. • If you're really worried about something, speak up. Slow medicine means being thoughtful — not ignoring what your body is telling you. But something being modern and expensive and cutting-edge doesn't mean it's always better medicine. We need to be a little bit more open with the general public about the uncertainties. We'll never understand the meaning of different genes to healthy populations if we don't test them, so we need to do the population-based testing. But we need to be careful before we begin offering genetic tests to unsuspecting members of the public who probably think we understand them a great deal better than we do. We're really on a learning curve at the moment. A little bit more clarity and honesty with the public would go a long way. How would you respond to somebody who hears we should be testing less and diagnosing less and immediately thinks, 'Well, you're just going to put my health at risk.' Listen, I don't want a diagnosis missed in myself. I don't want to be the doctor who misses things either. So I completely understand people's fear of dialing back. It's not about replacing all these tests with nothing. It's really advocating for this concept of slow, thoughtful medicine with good clinicians that we invest in good doctors, good nurses, good diagnosticians, and we don't feel the need to be compelled to jump into tests and diagnosis at that first meeting. We have time to spend with our patients and meet them again to discuss the problem. That's how you come to both a good understanding between patient and doctor. A quality diagnosis is made with time and understanding.
Globe and Mail
26-05-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
STAT (STAT) Is Now Available for Trading on LBank Exchange
Road Town, British Virgin Islands--(Newsfile Corp. - May 26, 2025) - LBank Exchange, a premier global digital asset trading platform, has officially listed STAT (STAT) on May 20, 2025, at 8:00 AM (UTC). The STAT/USDT trading pair is accessible at giving users access to a powerful platform built at the intersection of AI analytics, community intelligence, and real-time market insight. STAT Listing Banner To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: STAT is not just a token-it will serve as the core utility within an expansive ecosystem of tools designed to empower crypto traders and investors with real-time data, predictive signals, and crowdsourced intelligence. With features like STAT Lock-up, STAT Live, and STAT InfoBot, the project will redefine how investors consume and act on crypto information. STAT: The Future of AI-Powered Crypto Intelligence The STAT platform will merge artificial intelligence, social sentiment, and live market signals into a seamless user experience. Its flagship news and insights channel will enable users to stay informed with minute-by-minute updates, predictive analytics, and actionable market sentiment-all powered by data from global crypto communities and exchanges. By introducing tools such as STAT Live (voice-delivered breaking news), STAT InfoBot (real-time monitoring of price and CEX events), and tailored AI reports, STAT will transform information overload into strategic clarity. Whether it's understanding whale behavior or catching trends before they go mainstream, STAT will deliver a competitive edge. The platform's integrated community forum will facilitate knowledge exchange, technical analysis, and strategic discussion-amplifying the value of every user's insight. Meanwhile, STAT Lock-up will incentivize long-term holding by offering tiered access to AI-generated content, exclusive insights, and partner utilities. Tokenomics The STAT token will power access to all premium functionalities within the ecosystem-from AI reports and voice-delivered news to staking rewards and membership-based services. Key Details: Token Usage: STAT Lock-up: Required to access platform memberships and premium services Access Control: Certain features (alerts, premium content, partner benefits) will be available only to users who lock or hold a defined amount of STAT Utility Scaling: Benefits will be tiered across individual investors, institutions, and foundations Token Distribution Plan (as per official chart): Ecosystem (40%) Reserved to support long-term ecosystem growth, AI infrastructure development, and platform utility expansion. Private Sales (20%) Allocated to early investors and strategic backers who support development and initial liquidity provisioning. Marketing (15%) Used to fund awareness campaigns, user acquisition initiatives, and long-term community-building efforts. Partnership (15%) Allocated to key strategic partnerships and integrations that expand platform features and adoption. Team & Advisors (10%) Reserved for core contributors, executives, and advisors who are building and scaling STAT over the long term. STAT introduced a deflationary component by using a portion of platform revenue for token buybacks or burns. As of 2024, over 3 million STAT have already been burned to reduce supply and strengthen token value. Leadership Team STAT is led by a dual-CEO structure combining engineering precision and business vision: Juhwan Park (Co-CEO) Former Boeing and Hyundai MOBIS software engineer, Juhwan brings deep experience in system programming, automated investment algorithms, and aerospace-grade infrastructure development. Byoungchan Eum (Co-CEO) A strategic leader with over 20 years of experience, Byoungchan has held executive roles at Kakao AI, Hyundai Card, and Element AI. He also serves as a Venture Partner at Scale Asia Ventures. Learn More about STAT Website: About LBank Founded in 2015, LBank is a top crypto exchange offering financial derivatives, asset management, and secure trading. With over 15 million users across 210+ regions, LBank ranks in the top 20 for spot trading and top 15 for derivatives trading globally, ensuring fund integrity and supporting global crypto adoption. Leveraging its acute market insight and expertise, LBank always takes the lead in spotting and listing Alpha altcoins. The platform was among the first to list popular gem coins like BONK, BOME, and FLOKI, as well as emerging favorites like NEIRO, MOODENG, GOATSEUS, and PNUT, offering impressive returns to investors. Start Trading Now:
Vox
13-05-2025
- Health
- Vox
Trump picked a wellness influencer to be surgeon general and it's breaking MAHA brains
covers health for Vox, guiding readers through the emerging opportunities and challenges in improving our health. He has reported on health policy for more than 10 years, writing for Governing magazine, Talking Points Memo, and STAT before joining Vox in 2017. The Make America Healthy Again movement's infiltration of federal health policy took another step forward last week when President Donald Trump nominated Dr. Casey Means, a 'metabolic health evangelist' and an ally of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to be his surgeon general. If confirmed by the Senate in the coming weeks, Means will hold one of the most visible public health roles in the country, and would be set to boost Kennedy's vision for remaking the nation's approach to health and wellness. But who is Means? And where does she fit in the broader MAHA space? Like Kennedy, she is an insider turned outsider: She graduated from Stanford Medical School but dropped out of her residency program in 2019 shortly before completing it because she came to view the health care system as 'exploitative.' She's since pivoted to focus on personal wellness, challenging the health care establishment along the way. In doing so, she's found an eager audience, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. In 2019, she started a health tech company called Levels that marketed at-home glucose monitors. Means herself has pitched the devices as a general health tool not only for people with diabetes, for whom they were originally developed, but for everyone — even though research studies have found no benefit for those without the condition. Perhaps coincidentally, last month, Kennedy floated having the federal government cover the costs of such devices for some patients, rather than cover new weight-loss drugs, as one way to arrest the country's obesity crisis. Last year, Means published a bestselling book called Good Energy, co-authored with her brother Calley Means, that cemented her place as a MAHA champion who would take on the health care industrial complex. In their book, the Meanses advance a theory of 'metabolic dysfunction' — that Americans' bodies are bad at producing energy because of our poor diets and sedentary lifestyles, and which is the root cause of chronic diseases, including not only obesity and diabetes but even schizophrenia and depression. (Scientists have found that metabolism is central to the development of obesity and its associated diseases, but the underlying causes remain the subject of active research.) Good Energy paints a grand conspiracy that the food and medical industries have little motivation to prevent diseases from occurring because once a person becomes ill, they start using medical services and making money for health care providers. Experts say Means's commentary on metabolism is often overly simplistic. She can also stray into sounding more like a spiritual guru than a medical doctor, prone to talking about 'dark energy' and speculating that our brains may be more like receivers that tap into the divine. She appears to view people's ill health as a matter of spiritual disorder as much as a physical phenomenon. 'Humans are out of alignment with the Earth and depleting its life force,' she wrote last year. 'And human bodies are now exhibiting signs of blocking the flow of energy through them. This is insulin resistance. We are the Earth.' To Means's public health critics, she is both anti-science — she frequently criticizes vaccines in her weekly newsletter — and fundamentally unqualified to be, as the surgeon general is often known, America's doctor. (Her medical license actually lapsed in 2019.) 'Appointing Casey Means, a non-practicing doctor who has spent years peddling unproven 'health interventions,' means a surgeon general that will put a fringe practitioner of unproven functional medicine in charge of educating the American people about their health and disease challenges,' Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at New York University, told the New York Times. But Kennedy says Means is 'the perfect choice' for surgeon general — her unorthodoxy a feature, not a bug. 'Casey articulates better than any American the North Star of a country where we have eliminated diabetes, heart disease, and obesity through prioritizing metabolic health,' Kennedy wrote on X. 'Casey will help me ensure American children will be less medicated and better fed — and significantly healthier — during the next four years. She will be the best Surgeon General in American history.' The surgeon general, though not a policy-making role, has the influence to drive the national conversation on health and can draw attention to important changes in the nation's health. Vivek Murthy, President Joe Biden's surgeon general, released a widely covered report on the loneliness epidemic and called for cancer warnings on alcohol packaging during his tenure. Already Means has outlined what she'd like to see: less corporate influence in health and food, less ultraprocessed foods in the American diet, a reformed meatpacking industry, and more. Means's priorities are consistent with Kennedy's agenda, which is why it was so surprising when Means's nomination sparked outrage among some in the MAHA universe. But wait — is this the beginning of a MAHA civil war? Not in the least. But before we get into why not, here's what's going on: Means's critics have gotten a lot of attention recently by portraying her as insufficiently committed to MAHA's various goals — particularly in her opposition to vaccines — and suggested that nebulous dark forces may be at work against the movement. As journalist Helena Bottemiller Evich wrote in her newsletter Food Fix, some anti-vaccine activists have come to believe an emphasis on food wellness has overtaken vaccine safety as Kennedy's primary focus, and Means's nomination exacerbated those tensions. According to the Washington Post, one anti-vax influencer said Means's appointment showed Kennedy was actually 'powerless' within the Trump circle. 'I don't know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on,' Nicole Shanahan, who was Kennedy's vice-presidential candidate during his presidential run, posted on X. 'It has been clear in recent conversations that he is reporting to someone regularly who is controlling his decisions (and it isn't President Trump).' Shanahan, after speculating that Kennedy had come under somebody else's influence, called the Means siblings 'aggressive and artificial.' Far-right commentator and internet personality Laura Loomer called Means 'a Witch Doctor' and insisted Trump could not have selected her of his own accord. But according to Trump, he picked Means because Kennedy recommended her for the position. So while the rift is eye-catching, it is probably better understood as interpersonal rivalries spilling into the open rather than any meaningful change in direction for Kennedy or the MAHA agenda he is implementing at HHS. Kennedy has nurtured a movement in which conspiracy theories are commonplace and now that he's disappointed some of his supporters by endorsing Means, they are seeing more conspiracies. The MAHA movement encompasses everything from vaccine skepticism and elaborate theories of chronic disease to eliminating environmental toxins and eradicating corruption in the health system. Means may bring a particular focus on food and wellness to the surgeon general position, but if you look at his record so far, Kennedy has begun working aggressively across a wide range of issues. In his first few months as health secretary, Kennedy has downplayed the efficacy of the measles shot in favor of alternative treatments amid the worst outbreak in decades. He has also ridiculed vaccine mRNA technology, calling into question a future Covid-19 vaccine for children. And he has launched a vaccine safety investigation and ordered a probe into autism's causes. At the same time, Kennedy has already sought voluntary commitments from food manufacturers to remove artificial dyes from their products and tried to crack down on more additives in ultraprocessed foods. Last week, the FDA and NIH launched yet another research initiative, this one on diet-related chronic disease, that aims to understand how certain foods affect metabolism, the cornerstone of Means's theory of our modern health problems. All of this drama over Means's nomination does clarify some things about the MAHA movement: The coalition is reactive and conspiratorial, but its key figures are moving at stunning speed to remake the country's approach to health care. Tapping Means is another step in that direction; her nomination isn't a sign of MAHA fracturing — it's a sign of Kennedy doubling down. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with President Donald political potency, much like Trump's MAGA movement, is aided by its malleability: Make America Healthy Again could mean a lot of different things to different people, from hardcore anti-vaxxers to the kind of crunchy conservative wellness influencer that Means typifies. But while that ambiguity can be an asset in a campaign, it presents a challenge when governing. You have different constituencies who, while happy to be unified to win an election, are now pushing you to pick different personnel, to prioritize different issues, to frame issues in different terms.
