By STELLA GARNER
Capital News Service
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) sparred with surgeon general nominee Dr. Casey Means in a confirmation hearing held Wednesday morning, questioning her history of commercial sponsorships and views on various vaccines.
Means, a wellness influencer and former advisor to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, faced intense questioning from Democratic and Republican senators about her professional experience.
The senator also brought up Dr. Means’ social media posts on Hepatitis B vaccines. In 2024, she wrote in an X post that giving children with healthy parents the Hepatitis B vaccine “is absolute insanity.”
“Through brief search of the products that you’ve made money off of in your newsletters, many of them have been found to contain the same neurotoxins that you claim are in these vaccinations,” Alsobrooks said.
Means said she supports vaccines and that her tweet was taken out of context.
“I think there’s a nuanced conversation that American families are looking to have about shared clinical decision making with their doctors about specific vaccines that their children may not be as seriously at risk for,” she said.
In the past, Alsobrooks has criticized Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Kennedy has supported Means and her nomination.
“She has an extraordinary capacity to communicate to the American public, that is the function of the surgeon general,” Kennedy said of the nominee at a press event this week. “We’ve been waiting a long time for her presence, we are very excited about it, and … hopefully she’ll be on very, very soon.”
The Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee now faces a vote to advance Means’ nomination to the Senate floor.
