By John Leake
Courageous Discourse
May 10, 2025
I once asked my old mentor, Roger Scruton-a famous British political philosopher-why he'd never pursued a career in politics.
Because intellectuals are ill-suited for political decision making, which is about dealing with aggressive competing interests and finding compromises that are seldom entirely satisfying for any particular party.
This reminded me of a witty remark made by the 19th century Austrian statesman, Eduard Taaffe, who observed:
Politics is the business of keeping all interested parties in a state of equal dissatisfaction.
Yesterday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. gave an interview with Brett Baier on FOX in which he endorsed President Trump's new pick for Surgeon General, Casey Means.
"She walked away from traditional medicine because she was not curing patients," Kennedy said. He was referring to the fact that Means never finished her residency and does not have an active medical license.
She couldn't get anybody within her profession to look at the nutrition contributions to illness. If we're really going to heal people, if we're healers, we can't just be making our life about billing new procedures.
Judging from my reader comments, my defense of Secretary Kennedy's decision to endorse Ms. Means has made many people unhappy.
I understand the concern about her lack of medical credentials. I would have preferred that President Trump have asked Dr. Joe Ladapo or Dr. Peter McCullough if either of them would be interested in holding the position.
I would also prefer that President Trump recognize that COVID-19 vaccines have done far more harm than good and to pull them off the market.
On the other hand, I believe that Secretary Kennedy made a good point in his interview with Brett Baier.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that the U.S. medical profession has gone down a very dark cul-de-sac of orthodoxy and pharmaceutical industry capture.
I also recognize that President Trump and Secretary Kennedy are under pressure from an array of powerful interests and that neither man holds absolute executive authority. When we Americans grow weary of the messy business of politics, we should remember that the alternative is dictatorship or absolute monarchy.
In the final analysis, I believe the prudent thing to do in this situation is to defer to the judgement of Secretary Kennedy, who has carefully vetted Ms. Means. He is aware of the concerns that have been raised about her, and he is certainly taking them into consideration.
Now is a good time to remember that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been raising concerns about vaccine safety since 2005 and has taken more flak for it than everyone in the medical freedom movement combined.
Unlike most dissidents, he was a comfortably ensconced member of the upper echelon of American society when he began to vocalize his concerns and was made to suffer for it. How many other celebrities have dared to raise concerns about vaccines, much less made this concern a focus of their work in the public forum?
For her part, Ms. Means should consider that the tens of millions of people who supported Secretary Kennedy and President Trump are acutely aware of the mountains of evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines have inflicted grave harm on the health of humanity.
In light of this, she should speak more forthrightly about these concerns, which would go a long way to dispelling the suspicion that her interest in nutrition is a strategy for changing the subject away from vaccine harms.
COVID-19 vaccine harms and the shocking rise of profound autism are too glaring to ignore. If Ms. Means is confirmed as Surgeon General, she should focus as much (if not more) critical scrutiny on the evidence of vaccine harms as she is currently focusing on America's abysmal food industry.
This article was originally published on Courageous Discourse.