At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams stood with President Donald Trump at the White House, serving as a prominent face of the president’s health agenda.
Now Adams has taken a far different stand: trying to stop Trump’s nominee to be his successor, Casey Means, from being confirmed as the nation’s top doctor.
Means’s nomination has stalled in the Senate, where several Republicans have questioned her stance on vaccines, her pushes against the medical establishment and her medical credentials.
No past surgeon general has come forward to defend Means as she fights for Senate confirmation. Instead, Adams and others have spent the past year questioning her credentials, noting that she left her surgical residency in its final year and went on to decry the medical establishment and pursue functional medicine, which focuses on lifestyle interventions to tackle the root causes of chronic diseases.
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“The role of surgeon general has centuries of precedent and requirements, and she doesn’t meet them,” Adams said in an interview, framing his disagreements as “operational, not personal.”
