Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended the Trump administration’s new pick for surgeon general and reassured he is not being “controlled,” as his former running mate suggested.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced that Dr. Casey Means, a surgeon-turned-wellness influencer, will replace Janette Nesheiwat as his surgeon general nominee. In an interview on Thursday, Fox News host Bret Baier questioned Kennedy over recent remarks made by his former running mate, Nicole Shanahan, during his brief 2024 presidential run, who suggested he was being “controlled.”
Following Trump’s announcement, Shanahan called the pick “strange” and said she was promised Means wouldn’t have a role in the administration if she backed Kennedy during his Senate confirmation.
“I don’t know if RFK very clearly lied to me, or what is going on. 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),” she wrote on social media this week.
Kennedy dodged the question.
“Listen, you’ve got sitting here four people who were all canceled during Covid,” he told Baier, referring to the men sitting next to him: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, and National Institutes of Health director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
“The entire leadership of this agency are renegades who are juggernauts against convention and who are trying to look for truth, no matter what the cost. Casey is among those,” Kennedy said.
The Fox News host also pressed the secretary about Means’ background, noting the swift criticism she’s already received.
“Obviously, she’s come under her own criticism about some of the things she’s advocated for, she never finished her residency, and she doesn’t currently have an active medical license,” Baier said. “But that’s not an issue?”
Kennedy defended her accomplishments, mentioning that she was at the “top of her class” at Stanford University.
Means “walked away from traditional medicine because she was not curing patients,” the secretary replied. “She couldn’t get anybody within her profession to look at the nutrition contributions to illness, and she said, ‘If we’re really gonna heal people, if we’re healers, we can’t just be making our life about billing new procedures. We actually have to figure out new approaches to medicine, and that’s the kind of leadership that she’s gonna bring to our country.”
When asked about what happened with Nesheiwat, who withdrew her bid for the post, Kennedy said the administration believed Means “was the best person to really bring the vision of [Make America Healthy Again] to the public.”
