The absurd attacks on Casey Means reveal just how far off course our healthcare conversations have veered, and how badly entrenched interests--including Big Food and its industry-funded social media gurus--are terrified of change.

Casey has excelled in every endeavor she has undertaken. She was President of her Stanford undergrad class, was a standout at Stanford Medical School, and was a top performer in surgical residency. She had the courage to leave traditional medicine because she realized her patients weren’t getting better.

The attacks that Casey is unqualified because she left the medical system completely miss the point of what we are trying to accomplish with MAHA. Casey is the perfect choice for Surgeon General precisely because she left the traditional medical system--not in spite of it. Her leadership has inspired many doctors to reform the system and forge a new path away from sick care, which fills corporate coffers, and toward health care, which enriches all of us.

After leaving traditional medicine, Casey started a company and wrote a New York Times best-selling book that empowered patients and helped launch the MAHA movement. This ability of Casey’s to inspire Americans to rethink our healthcare system is also an existential threat to the status quo interests, which profit from sickness.

The goal of MAHA is to reform the largest and most powerful industry in the United States. I have little doubt that these companies and their conflicted media outlets will continue to pay bloggers and other social media influencers to weaponize innuendo to slander and vilify Casey, the same way they try to defame me and President Trump.

But it will not work. Every day, I wake up emboldened to drive change because I know the support of MAHA moms has my back. Casey has played an integral role in galvanizing these moms.

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. 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.