Calley Means, an influential adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the brother of President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, quietly departed the White House at the end of his term as a special government employee about a month ago, he said in an interview on Wednesday night.
For much of the last six months, Mr. Means has acted as the health secretary’s right hand, coordinating a major presidential commission report on what it described as the dire state of children’s health and sparring on television and online with vaccine scientists and doctors who objected to Mr. Kennedy’s campaign to remake American medicine.
He also drew criticism from Democratic members of Congress for the financial advantages he stood to gain from changes to the health care system being pursued by the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and its Trump administration backers.
Mr. Means co-founded the wellness company Truemed, which helps people buy items like Peloton bikes and $8,000 saunas with money not subject to federal income taxes, making it a potential beneficiary of Trump administration plans to broaden the pool of people eligible for such tax-advantaged spending.
The White House, where Mr. Means served as a special government employee, never formally announced his departure. And in the weeks since he left, Mr. Means has been cited in news reports as a White House adviser and aide to Mr. Kennedy in the course of lacerating hospitals, insurers and pharmaceutical companies for “making money off more sick patients.”
Mr. Means’s speaker biography for a health industry conference where he appeared last week said that “Calley is a special government employee to the White House on MAHA strategy.”
Mr. Means, who had been appointed in March, said that the news reports suggesting he was still employed by the White House were inaccurate and that the biography was outdated. He said he had spoken at the conference only in general terms.
As a special government employee, Mr. Means was limited to a 130-day term. Democratic members of Congress have said that term should have ended around late July. Mr. Means said that he had taken time off earlier in the year and left the White House about a month ago, when his term ran out.
The Trump administration is likely to gain a different Means sibling to help steer health policy in short order. With Mr. Kennedy’s strong backing, Mr. Means’s sister, Dr. Casey Means, was nominated by Mr. Trump in May to be surgeon general.
Dr. Means, who alongside her brother became a high-profile emissary of the MAHA movement last year after they co-wrote a book about problems they saw as bedeviling American medicine, was to have appeared before a Senate health committee for her nomination hearing on Thursday.
But Dr. Means, who had been due to give birth this week, went into labor shortly before the hearing, which was postponed.
Like her brother, Dr. Means benefited from a booming wellness industry as she poured scorn on mainstream medicine, which she has said consigns patients to a frustrating cycle of treatments that fails to address the underlying causes of illness.
She co-founded Levels, a company that sells continuous glucose monitors not to people with diabetes, the traditional users of such devices, but to customers who want to eat nutritious food and maintain steady blood sugar levels. The company charges customers up to $1,499 per year for packages that include glucose monitoring, lab panels and health coaching.
In government filings last month, Dr. Means said that she would resign from her advisory role at Levels and sell her stock. She also said she would step away from work as an influencer promoting dietary supplements and wellness products.
Benjamin Mueller reports on health and medicine. He was previously a U.K. correspondent in London and a police reporter in New York.
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