Casey Means, President Donald Trump’s pick for surgeon general, has achieved an unlikely feat: uniting vaccine skeptics and mainstream medical advocates against her nomination.
Activists in both camps are now urging senators to vote her down.
After Means’ confirmation hearing last week Kayla Hancock, a vaccine proponent and director of the liberal health care advocacy group Protect Our Care’s Public Health Watch project said Means is “too damn dangerous to be Surgeon General.” At the same time, physician and prominent vaccine skeptic Mary Talley Bowden pointed to Means’ statements touting vaccines as “life-saving” as a “cop-out.”
Means is likely to need every Republican on the Senate’s health committee behind her to advance to a confirmation vote. But some GOP lawmakers are reassessing what having an avowed vaccine skeptic at the top of the health department, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has wrought and aren’t sure they want to empower another department leader with an equivocal position on immunization.
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