The Siblings Behind RFK Jr.’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Campaign

Hey, of course RFK is a little "fucked up". But if they keep him away from the "Vaccine Dept" and keep him siloed on the food chain stuff he...might have some helpful ideas.

The key to is keep him on the meds (he doesn't like taking).

The Siblings Behind RFK Jr.’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Campaign

The wellness-minded pair, poised to shape Trump’s health agenda, represent a sharp break from his first term

By Kristina Peterson and Liz Essley Whyte, WSJ

Updated Nov. 13, 2024 12:01 am ET

WASHINGTON—They are pushing for healthier school meals, sustainable agricultural practices and banning some food colorings—and they are about to shape President-elect Donald Trump’s health agenda.

Meet Calley Means and Dr. Casey Means, the brother-sister duo who have built a wellness empire by questioning some traditional medical expertise and vaccine mandates, but who have also tapped ideas more recognizable to the political left to fuel the Trump-aligned Make America Healthy Again movement.

The ascent of the siblings, who are top advisers to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has underscored the unusual bedfellows that have comprised Trump’s winning coalition.

“Michelle Obama was right, you know, to some degree,” Calley Means said in an interview before the election, describing the former first lady’s efforts to add vegetables and whole grains to school lunches—a program that Republicans widely criticized at the time.

Means, a former food-industry lobbyist, and his sister, Casey, a Stanford-educated surgeon, have pushed for a radical overhaul of the country’s food and health systems, driven by a deep distrust of the pharmaceutical and food industries. They have also espoused some disputed medical theories.

Calley Means said he had a vision of dedicating his life to reforming healthcare after a high dose of the psychedelic drug psilocybin. Trump campaign advisers have passed around their bestselling book, “Good Energy.”

Kennedy, along with retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, have emerged as favorites for secretary of Health and Human Services, people familiar with the matter said. The president-elect is close to making a decision, according to people familiar with the matter, with foes of Kennedy attempting to block him by suggesting Carson or other names, such as former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal or former Deputy Health Secretary Eric Hargan.

Trump has promised Kennedy wide influence over health and agriculture appointments. Kennedy has been crafting lists of potential personnel—even launching a website to solicit crowdsourced nominees—with Calley Means by his side as health-policy adviser.

Their priorities are different from those of the health-policy stalwarts of the first Trump administration, known for overseeing the fast development of Covid-19 vaccines.

Now, Trump’s victory could put the siblings in position to try to orchestrate some of the ideas they have been advocating, including eliminating certain chemicals from food and water, removing industry influence from the government’s advice on nutrition and medicine, changing agricultural subsidies so that healthy foods are cheaper, requiring medical schools to teach nutrition courses and removing liability protections for vaccine makers.

Kennedy has mentioned both siblings as people he would recommend to Trump for prominent roles in his administration. Casey Means, in particular, is viewed as a favorite of Kennedy’s for surgeon general or commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that regulates about one-fifth of the U.S. economy.

“There’s this populist frustration about our institutions letting us down,” Calley Means said in the interview.

Sweat tent

Calley Means was once a self-proclaimed “Never Trumper,” but another vision inspired him to bring Kennedy and Trump together.

Means met Kennedy after appearing on a February episode of Tucker Carlson’s podcast, and Kennedy liked his message about relying on food, not medications such as Ozempic, to fight obesity. The two men sat in a sweat tent in Austin, Texas, where Means said he realized: “What RFK represents is actually what Trump represents.”

In July, on the night of an attempt to assassinate Trump in Butler, Pa., Means helped broker a call between Kennedy and Trump.

In their book, many podcast appearances, newsletters and social media, the Means siblings criticize the medical system’s approach to trying to solve chronic diseases with specialists and medication, rather than a holistic look at the body’s needs through nutrition, exercise and health-tracking technology. Casey Means co-founded Levels, a subscription-based app that connects to wearable glucose monitors, while Calley Means co-founded TrueMed, a company whose affiliated doctors can affirm wellness products are medically necessary so that customers can buy them with health-savings accounts.

Casey Means has emerged as a wellness guru, sharing, through videos and links, her favorite supplements and skin creams, some of which pay her a “small percentage,” her website says.

Top U.S. medical officials have already raised some of the ideas the siblings tout. Current FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf has repeatedly publicly decried the rise of chronic diseases and called for more studies into the role of ultraprocessed foods in disease.

“If the right wing wants to make America healthy again, I think that’s fantastic,” said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor emerita at New York University, who shares the Means duo’s concerns over ultraprocessed foods and would like to expunge industry funding of research. But, she said, “The question is how they’re going to do that—are they going to do it by fiat? We don’t work that way in this country.”

Claims in dispute

The duo’s skepticism of the medical establishment can go too far for many. Calley Means has said that Covid-19 vaccine mandates for children are a “war crime.” Casey Means has championed relying on “divine gifts of intuition and heart intelligence” rather than “blindly ‘trusting the science.’”

“A lot of these things are just claims, and they present them like they’re beholders of secret truth,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious-disease epidemiologist who is a senior science communication adviser at a foundation that works on public-health issues, the de Beaumont Foundation. Advising people to avoid chemicals they can’t pronounce makes no sense, Rivera said, because most people can’t pronounce the chemicals that make up a banana, for example.

The food industry also disputes their claims. “Keeping consumers and their families safe is the number-one priority for the consumer packaged-goods industry,” said Sarah Gallo, senior vice president of product policy at the Consumer Brands Association, which represents major food manufacturers.

Both Means siblings followed a more traditional path for years before breaking away. Casey Means was a Stanford Medical School-trained surgeon, until she grew frustrated by what she describes as a siloed system where she was trained to only treat symptoms but not resolve the underlying health problems.

Calley Means had interned for John McCain’s presidential campaign and later lobbied on behalf of the food and pharmaceutical industries before going to business school and diving into startups.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, their mother was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and died 13 days later. For both siblings, her death marked a turning point, as they looked back at her earlier health problems as red flags that could have been addressed.

Casey Means was surprised by how aggressively their mother’s doctors pushed for surgical interventions the family rejected, saying that doctors estimated they would only have prolonged her life for at most a few months while diminishing her quality of life.

“The final 13 days I shared with my mom were the most meaningful of my life,” she wrote in their book, adding: “If we had taken the advice of the medical system, they wouldn’t have happened.”

Write to Kristina Peterson at kristina.peterson@wsj.com and Liz Essley Whyte at liz.whyte@wsj.com