WHATEVER MEANS NECESSARY

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s MAHA movement, CALLEY MEANS has been a key leader of its federal health takeover. But former coworkers have questions about whether Means embellished the powerful narrative he rode to the top

KATHERINE EBAN

"IT SOUNDS VERY WOO-WOO"

In March 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. crowded into a sweat lodge near Austin with about 40 other people, including a regenerativefarming advocate and a nutritionalsupplement entrepreneur.

"We were front to back, side to side, you couldn't move," Chase Iron Eyes, a Lakota legal activist, later recalled on a podcast. "I was like, Man, I want to get out. I got to take a break. And then I was thinking, I'm the only Lakota in here.... My whole nation's riding on me over here." He stayed in.

The sweat lodge was the closing event of the American Wellness Summit, a one-day fundraiser for Kennedy's presidential campaign. Those in attendance had come in search of spiritual healing and cleansing renewal, yes, but also access to worldly power.

And indeed, one of the people perspiring inside that jam-packed lodge was struck by a vision that would prove to have seismic repercussions for the health of every American, "it sounds very woowoo," Galley Means, 39, told Joe Rogan six months later. " I just had this strong vision of [Kennedy] standing with Tmmp."

A former wedding-dress entrepreneur, Means had become a vocal proponent of ending chronic disease in America. Inspired by his epiphany inside the lodge and convinced that it represented the best path to implementing Kennedy's radical health care agenda, Means enlisted Tucker Carlson to help arrange a meeting between the candidates. On the night of July 13, after the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Means and Carlson made the fateful introduction. "There's rare moments in history when the deck can change," Means told Rogan, adding that he felt "this could be a realignment of American politics."

As Means described it, the bond between the Republican fast-food aficionado and the Democratic vaccine foe was emotional and instantaneous. They "had weeks of conversations, and there was not a discussion of polling" or the political horse race, Means said. "These were tear-filled conversations about why kids are getting so diabetic, about why we have such obese children in the United States, about why we have a fertility crisis." Leaked video of the two men talking by phone the day after the assassination attempt showed a less emotionally charged conversation. Trump could be heard wooing Kennedy and embracing his controversial theories. Rifling on an allegedly excessive childhood vaccination, Trump said, "it looks like it's meant for a horse, not a 10-pound or 20-pound baby."

In short order Trump became president, Kennedy was sworn in as the nation's health secretary, and Galley Means became RFK Jr.'s right hand as a White House special government employee. In May, Tmmp nominated Means's sister, Casey Means, MD, a onetime surgical resident whose rise in antiestablishment health circles has mirrored Galley's, to serve as surgeon general. The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movementhad been catapulted from the left and right fringes to center stage, with the Means siblings positioned as its framers in chief.

Tall and wiry with a patrician air and an often intense public demeanor, Galley Means paints a vivid portrait of endemic corruption plaguing the US health system: a poisoned food supply; doctors and scientists with undisclosed conflicts of interest; revolving-door bureaucrats; and out-of-control vaccine mandates. At the American Wellness Summit, he promised that the scourge of chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes could be reversed "very quickly" once the corruption has been vanquished. And when the FDA announced a plan to phase out certain synthetic food dyes, Means was right there at the podium, extolling "a major win ofgrass roots forces against special interests" and declaringthat "the cries" of MAHA moms are "ringing out across the country."

A wide array of medical experts have warned that the MAHA agenda, and its slipshod implementation, will potentially set the country's public health back years. Their plans, says Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, are "not in line with the evidence and science that we know works. As a result people will be getting sicker, showing up for medical care at a later stage of disease, and at a higher cost."

Means betrays no doubts about the righteousness of his cause. Like many MAGA-adjacent influencers, he seems to delight in slamming his ideological enemies. At a Politico health care summit on April 2, journalist Dasha Burns asked him about mass firings at US health agencies. "It's insane for you to insinuate that the things standing between us and better health is more government bureaucrats," Means replied before turning his wrath on the audience. "The lobbyists in this room [are] laughing, when we have the sickest children in the developed world."

Given Means's dizzying rise from relative obscurity to the summit of America's federal health apparatus, his hyperconfidence may well be justified. That climb has been propelled by the personal story he has shared often: that he was a food and pharmaceutical lobbyist who saw firsthand the collusion of both industries with medical groups and academia.

And yet a six-month Vanity Fair investigation raises questions about whether Means has embellished his personal story. Nine of Means's former PRcolleagues dispute some of his key biographical assertions. As well, his health care company, Truemed, which helps patients use tax-free dollars to buy wellness products, is poised to benefit from the radical health care overhaul he has been championing. VF interviewed more than 60 people for this account and reviewed 24 of Means's public appearances since 2023, his social media accounts, related federal and state legislation, and tax, lobbying, and business records.

In May, Vanity Fair reached out to Means and presented him with an extensive list of questions for fact-checking and comment for this story. In response Means said, "I stand by everything I've said," adding that he was not surprised that anonymous sources were "spreading lies to Vanity Fair."

Means, who is a special government employee, is not listed on the White House website as having obtained an ethics waiver. "He's managed to avoid the scrutiny of a full-time government employee," says Virginia Canter, former associate counsel to Barack Obama and chief anti-corruption counsel at Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit organization working to defend the rule of law. Given his financial stake in health policy issues, " I am not sure that an ethics official would have signed off on this in normal times."

"I HELPED FUNNEL IT"

MAHA's would-be reformers are not wrong about the dismal record of our profit-driven health care system. About one fourth of working-age Americans are underinsured and routinely skip unaffordable care or incur medical debt. Roughly 26 million people, about 8 percent of the population, have no health insurance at all. Prescription drugs cost almost three times as much here as they do in comparable countries. And life expectancy in the US is about four years shorter than in other wealthy nations. Americans are so fed up that, when a UnitedHealthcare executive was killed in cold blood on a Manhattan sidewalk last December, the mood in some corners of the internet was downright celebratory.

Now the MAHA movement is in charge. Its tent is big enough to include Berkeley granola heads and anti-vaxxers, fitness junkies and right-wing tech bros, and even COVID-19 deniers, who allege the pandemic never occurred. A teeming marketplace of wellness grifters is along for the ride. While the movement's priorities range widely, from removing food dye from Froot Loops on one end to amending the Constitution to prohibit medical mandates (including vaccinations) on the other, they are all certain of one thing: You can't just tighten the cables of our existing health care system. You need to blow up the bridge.

In his three months in office, Kennedy has done just that. Hundreds of National Institutes of Health research studies— on everything from cancer risk factors to adolescent diabetes—have been axed. Gone are programs that tested milk for contaminants, shielded children from lead exposure, and decreased maternal mortality.

Amid a raging measles epidemic, which claimed the lives of two unvaccinated children in West Texas, Kennedy has offered only tepid support for the safe, effective, and long-studied MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine, which he recently claimed falsely on a News Nation panel has "a lot of aborted fetus debris." Meanwhile he has touted the healing benefits of vitamin A, the hype leading a number of Texas children to be hospitalized for toxic overexposure to the nutrient.

At every step Means has been cheerleading. In late March, when Kennedy's team forced out the FDA's top vaccine regulator, Peter Marks, MD, Means wrote on X that Marks was a "mediocre scientist" whose "main expertise appears to be public relations and having lunch with pharmaceutical executives." When Kevin Hall, PhD, a top nutrition scientist at NIH, resigned in late April, Means—who has no formal medical, public health, scientific, or nutritional credentials—wrote on X, "Good riddance Kevin."

Means—who has claimed falsely that COVID-19 was a foodborne illness that did not kill metabolically healthy people—has faced criticism for his lack of traditional expertise. "The arrogance of these bros...these professional podcasters who stand in front of career scientists and say, 'What has science ever done?"' Representative Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) said at the Politico health care summit shortly after Means left the stage. " I don't know, science eradicated measles—until two months ago."

But Means has sought to shore up his credibility by leveraging a key credential: He says that as a former lobbyist, he witnessed, and even participated in, the corrupt backroom dealmaking between pharmaceutical interests, Big Food, and the medical establishment. In a March 2024 appearance on Kennedy's podcast, he spoke with apparent insider knowledge of how Coca-Cola had lavished money on the very medical societies that should have been speaking out against soda consumption. "You wouldn't even believe this," he said, "but the American Diabetes Association took millions of dollars from Coke. I helped funnel it."

Galley Means is not a whistleblower. HE IS AN OPPORTUNIST, PEDDLING JUNK SCIENCE TO MAKE MILLIONS," says his former boss and mentor Steve Schmidt.

THE BIGGER HIS AUDIENCE AND THE MORE MEANS SPOKE, the more bewildered his former colleagues at Mercury and Edelman say they became.

That personal narrative of conversion contributed to vaulting the book he cowrote with Casey Means, Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, to the top of the bestseller list. Casey runs a health technology company called Levels, which helps customers track their blood glucose levels using continuous glucose monitors. She does not have an active medical license.

With their Ivy League pedigrees and skyrocketing trajectories, the Means siblings have aroused suspicion among some of the MAHA faithful. Some fear that they may be part of a "controlled opposition" sent by the global elite to sabotage Kennedy's mission to smash the vaccine-industrial complex. Means confronted two such critics on a heated episode of the Danny Jones Podcast, a show dedicated to bringing "fringe cultures to a wide audience." Defending his MAHA street cred, Means said "seeing that darkness" of corrupt dealmaking has been "foundational to who I am and what my story is."

But former colleagues from his time at Mercury Public Affairs and Edelman, the two publicity firms that employed Means, say his work would not have put him in the meetings he's described. In some instances the firms where he worked did not represent the clients whose meetings he says he staffed. His former mentor Steve Schmidt, a longtime Republican strategist who brought Means into Mercury and oversaw his work there, then helped him land the job at Edelman, says, "Galley Means is not a whistleblower. He is an opportunist, peddling junk science to make millions."

"I SAW INSIDE THE ROOM"

On January 2, 2023, Means made his social media debut as a Big Soda whistleblower. In a lengthy Twitter thread, he wrote, "Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding. I say Coke's policies are evil because I saw inside the room." He went on to lay out the company's playbook: "Coke gave millions to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation—both directly and through front groups like the American Beverage Association." The civil rights groups, he said, in turn denounced soda restrictions as racist.

He shared a 2013 New York Times article documenting the payments that flowed from the beverage industry to dozens of health advocacy and minority civil rights groups, enabling the defeat of soda regulations. He said the conversations he witnessed were "depressingly transactional." It was just the kind of urgent insider stuff that breaks through the noise, and the tweet thread garnered 12.3 million views and 52,000 likes.

Means offered even more vivid details on a podcast hosted by Dhru Purohit, a T rue med investor. " I was sitting in a room with the NAACP and Coke executives," Means said, "it was very unsettling. It was Coke executives telling the most prominent civil rights group in the United States, 'We're going to pay you millions of dollars, and we need you to call our opponents racists to shut down the debate.' "

Means would later tell Joe Rogan that, on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry, he helped steer money to academia to downplay the opioid crisis.

Means explained to the fitness trainer Jillian Michaels, on her podcast Keeping It Real, that "the food and pharma industries were my two big clients. I was a lobbyist and consultant.... One of my big accounts was the American Beverage Association, which is the front group for Coke." Michaels had introduced him as the "number one whistleblower in America."

" I was completely mesmerized by his ability to tell the truth about the health care industry," Vani Hari, a nutrition blogger known online as Food Babe, recalls. "I had never seen anyone like him before do that, in such a bold truthtelling fashion. I extremely admired that." Hari has become a staunch ally of Means and a voluble proponent of the MAHA agenda, often appearing at Trump administration events.

As his stature grew, Means received relatively little pushback. In 2023, however, the journalist Helena Bottemiller Evich, who covers the food industry in her "Food Fix" newsletter, asked him which consulting firm he was referencing in his Big Soda thread. Means "declined to specify," she wrote.

Means is not a whistleblower in the legally recognized sense. He didn't notify the authorities of any corporate wrongdoing or risk a job to divulge sensitive information. Many of the dealings he described were real, but they had been documented in the press long before he spoke out about them.

In at least eight public appearances identified by VF, Means has said he had been a lobbyist. A review of US lobbying records shows that he has never registered as one. In the two years since his viral tweet thread, he's been introduced as a "former food lobbyist" or "Coca-Cola whistleblower" in dozens of podcasts and presentations. Last August he appeared with his sister on Tucker Carlson's show. As Carlson said to him, "You were a lobbyist, okay?"

Means did not dispute the characterization and went on to describe how, as a junior employee, he attended a meeting where the food companies were "paying off, you know, nutrition researchers at Harvard and Stanford."

"So you saw that?" Carlson asked.

" My first week, you know, working for these industries," Means replied.

The episode became the most shared podcast of 2024, according to Apple rankings.

The bigger his audience and the more Means spoke, the more bewildered his former colleagues at Mercury and Edelman say they b e came, as they re calle d the largely administrative work Means had done at Mercury and the more benign PR he'd been tasked with at Edelman.

" I tried to scratch my brain and made a few calls to make sure I wasn't going crazy," says one former Mercury colleague. "Maybe there was a six-month window when we all blacked out, this client came in, and Galley became the whisperer behind the scenes, plotting a supposedly nefarious role with soda executives."

"GALLEY MEANS BUSINESS"

Means grew up "down the street from the White House," as he said in a 2023 biographical video. His father, Grady, worked as an aide to Richard Nixon's health secretary, then led the Food and Nutrition Task Force to reform America's food stamp program under Gerald Ford. He went on to run PricewaterhouseCoopers's government consulting business.

Means ran track and field at Georgetown Prep, then majored in political science at Stanford University, where he was president of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. He was drawn toward libertarianism, notably the idea that the free market should be protected from government intervention. As a rising junior in college, he interned at the Heritage Foundation and worked on a report whose language hews closely to his stance almost 20 years later. "Congress should not consider any health care legislation that does not expand personal control over health care dollars, expand consumer choice and competition, and reduce the already excessive level of health care regulation," the 2006 report stated.

His early résumé, obtained by Vanity Fair, displays a penchant for hyperbole. H e des crib e s a thre e -mo nth White H ouse internship at the offices of Presidential Scheduling and Correspondence, at age 19, as follows: "Acted as liaison between the President and American soldiers in Iraq by analyzing and referring letters, e-mails, and comments from soldiers directly to the President." A separate bullet point notes that he was "Youngest White House intern selected in 2005."

On the 2008 John McCain presidential campaign, he became part of a "pit crew," working to help resuscitate the sinking reputation of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. From there he followed senior campaign adviser Steve Schmidt, who returned to Mercury Public Affairs, where he was a partner.

In January 2009, at age 23, Means arrived at the company's Sacramento office. On Linkedln, Means says he worked there as a "Director" and describes his responsibilities as follows: "Collaborated with team of lawyers and management consultants to advise companies facing high-profile public strategy challenges. Clients in pharma, food, and energy spaces."

In reality, Schmidt and other former Mercury employees say, Means was his executive assistant. He was chiefly responsible for organizing Schmidt's travel, managing his schedule and expenses, and compiling his briefing notebooks. (Schmidt has become an outspoken critic of the Republican Party under Trump and cofounded The Lincoln Project. He resigned from the board in 2021 during a period of turmoil sparked by another cofounder's sexual harassment scandal.)

Some colleagues recall him as a goofy frat boy who drank to excess at after-hours work events and once bought his office mates wearable Snuggie blankets. Others found him aloof, with a "blue blood vibe," as one former colleague put it.

Schmidt recalls that he was once at a Starbucks at Ronald Reagan Airport, only to have his credit card declined. That led to his discovery that Means had failed to file more than $150,000 of Schmidt's expenses for reimbursement. "That was his competency level as an assistant," Schmidt says. Still, Schmidt recalls him as "thermonuclear smart" and a "bright young man in a hurry."

Means "definitely wanted to be in the strategic conversations, and that sometimes annoyed people," a former senior Mercury official recalls. "He wore his smartness on his sleeve, like someone who wanted to matter."

Though Mercury Public Affairs has registered lobbyists on its staff and is known to dabble in the "dark arts" of public persuasion, Means worked on the PR side, according to former coworkers. While he was there, Mercury represented a client that was trying to forestall a plastic-bag ban in California. It did represent PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry trade group, but mostly to help it gain access to the Obama White House so it could join negotiations over the Affordable Care Act, former Mercury officials say.

From 2009 to 2011, when Means worked at Mercury, the firm did not represent Coca-Cola or its trade group, the American Beverage Association, a Mercury spokesperson confirms. In 2010 the Coca-Cola Foundation did donate $135,000 to the NAACP. But at the time Mercury was actually working the other side of the issue, representing the California Endowment in its support of an additional tax on soda as a way to fight obesity. " We ran a campaign for them to get poor communities to stop drinking soda," one former Mercury official tells VF. The effort was supported by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, another Mercury client.

In 2011 Schmidt helped Means land a job at Edelman in its Washington, DC, office. There, old press releases show, Means helped Harvard Business School promote a roundtable on improving US competitiveness and flacked for a company launching a "wearable tech" center in Silicon Valley.

On weekends when his parents were away, he threw memorable parties at their house. At the office several colleagues recalled his air of self-importance. He seemed to have bigger and better plans ahead, which didn't include them. "He walked around the office saying, 'Galley Means business,' " another former colleague recounts.

Means's two-year stint at Edelman ended in 2013. The Coca-Cola Foundation again gave the NAACP $130,000 in 2011 and another $150,000 in 2012, according to its tax filings. But Edelman represented Pepsi during this period and could not have represented its archrival, say two of Means's former colleagues at the firm, who do not recall him working closely on food and beverage issues. During Means's tenure there, a spokesperson for Edelman says, the company did not represent either the American Beverage Association or Coca-Cola in the US. A spokesperson for the American Beverage Association confirms it never employed Edelman. Coca-Cola was unable to respond by deadline. The NAACP did not respond to a request for comment. (The American Beverage Association did fund a coalition that opposed soda restrictions during this time frame, but that group did not use Edelman to conduct PR, according to its tax filings and a former member of Edelman's leadership team who oversaw food and beverage accounts.)

The scenarios Means paints are "highly unrealistic" for another reason, says a former Edelman colleague. Had any money exchanged hands, the interactions would have included lawyers at each step and only "the highest-level folks" in the room. The former colleague adds, "A transaction [like that] at Edelman that would involve a junior associate is about as impossible or impractical an assertion that I could think of."

When reached for comment for this story, Means initially referred Vanity Fair to a former colleague he described as his lieutenant "to refute your bullshit smears." When contacted, the former colleague declined an interview, saying by text, "Galley shared the questions you sent over to him, and I did not work closely with him on those projects, so unfortunately can't provide any background."

"SHE WAS TEARFUL ABOUT IT"

After Edelman, Means went on to Harvard Business School, where he met Leslie Voorhees, who already had considerable business experience and had managed a Nike factory in Jakarta, Indonesia. They married in 2016 in Portland, Oregon, and that same year launched a wedding-dress start-up called Anomalie that gave brides an affordable way to custom-design their gowns. The dresses were made in China.

Means framed the company as a consequential disruptor of the status quo. "Fundamentally, the complete brokenness of the [wedding dress] industry has been an uncovered topic," he told a Forbes journalist in 2018, "and there's going to be a time this year when every reporter in the country is writing about it in anticipation of all these bankruptcies." That never happened, and the couple sold Anomalie to David's Bridal for an undisclosed price in 2022. Their son was born that year and they named him Roark, after the conformity-busting protagonist of The Fountainhead.

The inciting incident of Means's MAHA conversion had come a year earlier. In January 2021, Galley and Casey's mother, Gayle Brown Means, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died just a few weeks later. She was 71. It was a devastating loss, and it inspired them to take action, as Means told Joe Rogan last year. "Casey and I on her grave site literally hugged each other and said we want to write a book" to raise awareness about the missed warning signs of poor health that led their mother to be "chopped down by cancer."

Casey had already "embarked on a journey to understand the real reasons why people get sick," their book recounts. Good Energy presents a narrative of Casey Means's own journey from medical-establishment wunderkind to prominent critic. In 2018, just months before completing her five-year residency in ear, nose, and throat surgery at Oregon Health & Science University, "I walked into the chairman's office at OHSU and quit." The book describes her transformation from cog in a profit-driven sick-care system, with medical training that taught her nothing about the root causes of illness, to a physician freed to have "deep conversations" with her patients to help "restore and maintain good health."

Paul W. Flint, MD, who was chairman of the Department of OtolaryngologyHead and Neck Surgery at OHSU at the time, tells VF that when Means left the program, it was because she found the surgical work "too stressful" and was not able to continue in the residency, even after taking a paid leave.

Flint says that Means returned from leave saying, '"I still can't do this.' She was tearful about it." He adds that the other residents had to "cover for her, and we're a small department and all the calls fall on them."

Two former OHSU residents who served alongside Casey tell VF that they do not recognize the version of events laid out in the book. In their view Casey misrepresented her residency training and proclaimed a medical conspiracy against good health that simply didn't exist. They describe her as being anxious and fearful of harming patients, "it feels disingenuous, demonizing your practice. She didn't make it through," one of the former residents says. " By trying to question our entire field and sowing distrust in medicine, it's hard to ignore that she may benefit from that."

Another former resident says, "I did not witness a spiritual awakening. It felt more and more like she was preying on the less educated and using the MD she had to tout these pseudoscience things." (Casey Means declined to provide an on-the-record response. In a statement issued after her nomination, Stanford medical school reiterated that she graduated in 2014 and returned in 2022 to lecture on food and health. The school said: "We are proud that Casey Means, MD, has been nominated to serve as the United States Surgeon General.")

"BEWARE OF COMPANIES MISREPRESENTING NUTRITION...."

In June 2022 Galley Means and Justin Mares, founder of the Kettle & Fire bonebroth brand, launched Truemed. The goal was to enable patients to use their health savings accounts to buy wellness products. Typically, HSAs allowpatients with high-deductible health insurance policies to set aside pretax money to help pay for uncovered medical expenses. Using Truemed, customers could fill out an online survey, identify their symptoms, and quickly obtain a letter of medical necessity from a doctor or nurse practitioner. The letter, in turn, would allow them to use HSA dollars to "address the root cause" of chronic diseases, as Means puts it.

Truemed partners with companies that sell items ranging from supplements and red light therapy to smart mattresses that track sleep, and takes a percentage of the sales. One customer, seeking to purchase a Peloton bike through the website, filled out an online survey and in short order received a letter from a nurse practitioner citing an anxiety diagnosis and recommending that "the patient bike, row, tread through class membership for 150 minutes per week."

Truemed's initial vision was to rebrand partner companies, including the salad chain Sweetgreen and the meal-kit company Daily Harvest, as health care companies, according to early marketing materials obtained by VF. That would enable customers to use their tax-free HSA dollars to purchase food.

With their Ivy League pedigrees and skyrocketing trajectories, THE MEANS SIBLINGS HAVE AROUSED SUSPICION among some of the MAHA faithful.

In December 2023 a Washington Post wellness column explained to readers that they could now use HSA dollars for certain healthy foods and gym memberships, and Means was quoted saying that the company planned to partner with more large food brands soon. Three months later, however, the IRS issued an alert that warned, "Beware of companies misrepresenting nutrition, wellness and general health expenses as medical care" for HSAs and similar types of accounts.

The same day the Washington Post ran a follow-up, noting the IRS's warning and its caveat that "medical letters must result from face-to-face interactions with the patient, either in person or through telehealth visits. Getting a medical letter by filling out a questionnaire" was "not adequate," a potentially crushing blow to Truemed's business model.

On March 6, the day the Washington Post ran its follow-up, Means had his first sit-down with RFK Jr., as a guest on his podcast. In the episode, entitled "IRS: Pro-Pharma Anti-Health," released a week later, Means asserted a conspiracy. "Well, just to give some inside baseball, uh, a literal pharmaceutical lobbyist, uh, who was upset with what we were doing, tipped off the IRS and the IRS called the Washington Post." The IRS was embracing policies, Means suggested, that were intended to get Americans sick and onto a "pharmaceutical treadmill." By contrast, he described his company as "disruptive" and working against entrenched interests.

Sherry Glied, the dean of NYU's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, is an economist who has studied HSAs. She says the accounts amount to a tax break for the wealthy and are "completely useless" for someone living paycheck to paycheck. "You want medicalfreedom?" she says. "Spendyour own money. But why should I pay higher taxes because you want a Peloton bike?"

"FULL-METAL-JACKET CRAZY"

On February 13,2025, RFK Jr. was sworn in as health secretary. Speaking from the Oval Office, the scion of America's most famous Catholic family cast his rise in religious terms. "For 20 years I've gotten up every morning on my knees and prayed that God would put me in a position where I can end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country," he said. "On August 23 of last year, God sent me President Trump."

Five days later he told thousands of Health and Human Services employees that he intended to wage war on "the corrosive power of money as it infiltrates and captures institutions like ours." He vowed to remove conflicted members of advisory committees and shutter the revolving door to industry.

His own conflicts, and those of his closest allies, were another story. Incoming cabinet members are supposed to forfeit any financial interests that might compromise their official duties, but Kennedy tried to retain a 10 percent stake in personal-injury litigation targeting Merck over its Gardasil vaccine. Only after a public outcry did he transfer it to his son. As for Means, he posted an advertisement on Linkedln two days after the election for an opening at Truemed: a "Chief of Staff" to help manage the "intersecting worlds of Truemed and healthcare policy work." Canter of Democracy Defenders Fund says Means's post "seems to show an intent to develop policies, maybe in advance of entering government, to benefit his company."

By March, Means, now a special government employee assisting the MAHA commission, began flying from state to state and campaigning to ban sugary drinks from nutrition assistance programs. In response, MAGA lawmakers in red states have become unlikely advocates of a healthy-food movement. In late March, West Virginia's governor signed a bill removing seven different food dyes from school lunches.

To Vani Hari, the Food Babe, the GOP's embrace of MAHA is a welcome development. It's "so good for humanity, and so good for the country," says Hari, who was a two-time Obama delegate but says the Democrats never took up this issue as effectively, Michelle Obama's organic garden and Let's Move! efforts notwithstanding, "if the Democrats want to survive, they will have to try and out-MAHA the Republicans."

Yet others question whether MAHA is a movement at all. "it's an entity in which the branding has outstripped the content," says Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "There is a slogan and a certain amount of grift."

From the fringes of MAHA, medical-freedom hard-liners began to take aim at Means, seeing his emphasis on food policy as a misdirection strategy aimed at diluting the attack on vaccines. In blog posts they combed through his background, questioning his links to supposedly shadowy entities, from the Rockefeller family to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mary Talley Bowden, MD, who was suspended from Houston Methodist hospital in 2021 for promoting "dangerous misinformation which is not based in science" and has campaigned to get the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines pulled from the shelf, tells VF that Means sparked her suspicions when he "showed up out of nowhere as a leader" of the MAHA movement, then shifted the focus from Vaccines to food. "That was just a red flag for me," she says.

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Others think Means has been subjected to "bad jacketing," a targeted effort to undermine him by spreading doubt about his true-believer bona fides. "ifyou're not buying into the full-metal-jacket crazy, then you're controlled opposition," says a physician and MAHA insider. "You're serving some cult master that is not disclosed, in some way."

Means has done his best to assuage the suspicions, in part by adopting the fire-and-brimstone language of the MAHA fringe. He recently told a far-right streaming platform that "demonic forces" are "profiting from children being in fear, being addicted, being sick."

He's also gone out of his way to directly attack vaccine scientists. Ona CNN panel in February, he lit into fellow guest Paul Offit, a pediatrician who holds the Maurice R. Hilleman chair in vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, which is endowed by the pharmaceutical company Merck. Comparing Offit to a "NASCAR driver wearing their sponsors," Means said, "I mean, that is just insane. Merck does not have children's interests at heart."

As Offit struggled to explain that the endowed chair came with no quid pro quo and that Merck gives money to the medical school, not to him, Means laughed out loud and spoke over him. The segment rocketed around the internet.

"You're attacked in this fire hydrant way," says Offit, reflecting on the exchange, "for the purpose of creating a one-minute clip to show he's taken me on and brought me down."

"ONE BIG GNC STORE"

In January 2024 Means arrived at the Renaissance Esmeralda Resort in Palm Springs, California, for the annual meeting of a philanthropy called Stand Together, founded by the libertarian billionaire Charles Koch. Koch-backed organizations have long sought to dismantle government-subsidized health insurance programs, from the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid to the Veterans Health Administration, and replace them with tax credits to purchase private insurance. Nothing about the exclusive event was posted online, and the organizers held the guest list close.

Means was seeking funding to launch a nonprofit whose purpose was to end chronic disease, in part by lobbying the federal government to allow Americans to buy wellness items with HSA dollars—the very purchases offered by his company Truemed.

Not everyone was happy to see him. One former Stand Together employee who was there viewed an alliance with him as "reputationally a third rail," citing Means's lack of medical credentials and the shakiness of his public-health claims.

Regardless, in June 2024, Stand Together's health care director, J.C. Hernandez, became the executive director of End Chronic Disease, Means's nonprofit lobbying group. He has since changed his title to "co-founder" on his Linkedln account. According to his page on the social media site, he overlapped at both organizations for six months. Previously, Hernandez had worked as a registered lobbyist for another Koch organization, Americans for Prosperity. (Neither Hernandez nor Stand Together responded to requests for comment.)

The press release announcing the launch of End Chronic Disease listed 20 members of its coalition, including Means and his Truemed partner, Mares. It made no mention of specific donors, referring only to "funding through a bi-partisan group of leaders," and its website includes no financial disclosures. The nonprofit's registered address leads to the same office complex in Arlington, Virginia, where Stand Together, Americans for Prosperity, and the Charles Koch Foundation are headquartered. Of the original 20 coalition members, 12 had either invested in or partnered with Truemed. Today the coalition has grown to 28, including boldface names in the wellness space, from functional-medicine doctor Mark Hyman to Jillian Michaels. Both sell their products on the site, and Hyman was an investor.

The End Chronic Disease website until recently directed patients to contact their legislators, urging them to support the HOPE (Health Out-of-Pocket Expense) Act, which would allow HSA dollars to be used more expansively. In May, House Republicans passed their reconciliation tax bill, which, in addition to preserving tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and gutting Medicaid, contained a number of provisions that could expand HSA use significantly. Even without that expansion, one report estimates that by the end of 2026, HSA accounts will hold more than $175 billion in assets.

Many of the End Chronic Disease coalition members are selling products that would potentially benefit from such legislation: infrared saunas and cold plunges, herbal medicines and protein powders, and ketone drinks. Some are available through Truemed's platform.

Speaking with Vanity Fair, Representative Jake Auchincloss says of the MAHA takeover ofHHS: "Their self-designation as oracles of health care gives them license for corruption.... They are out there using tax-preferential dollars for wealthy people to buy saunas, and they are going to turn our entire health care system into one big GNC store."

On May 22, Trump and Kennedy sat shoulder to shoulder at the White House to deliver a report from the MAHA Commission, "Make Our Children Healthy Again." Over 72 pages, the paper, which Means helped to coordinate, calls out the scourge of ultra-processed foods, antidepressants, toxic pesticides, and the "possible role" of childhood vaccines in making our children "the sickest generation in American history," as Kennedyput it. (The MAHA Commission is scheduled to deliver its follow-up strategy paper in mid-August.)

The press event was in many ways the apotheosis of Means's whirlwind rise, with the two men he'd connected less than a year earlier driving a splashy news cycle.

Means was in the audience, sitting dead center, absorbing it all. In little more than a week, it would emerge that the report cited a number of studies that didn't actually exist. A White House press secretary said that "formatting issues" were to blame. Means took to X to argue that special interests were "quibbling with footnotes" while the report had fearlessly tackled "taboo subjects."

Additional reporting and research by Liz Rosenberg.