It’s another heavy week under the Trump Administration. I’m not going to comment on the fight we just picked with Iran. Unlike Donald and Pete, I know enough to know when I don’t know enough. I have opinions, sure, but I don’t have the expertise or deep breadth of knowledge needed to back them up. So, I’m going to keep those to myself and stick with the junction of domestic policy, health, and sex; lord knows we’ve got a lot to talk about there this week too. I will just add that it’s scary to live in a country that is clearly being run by the worst kind of people: incompetent individuals who think they know what they’re doing. I’m sorry we all have to go through this right now and that we’re dragging so much of the world into it with us. Our Surgeon General Nominee Hates Hormonal Birth ControlIn Casey Means we have yet another example of an incompetent individual who thinks they know what they’re doing, and this one falls firmly in my wheelhouse. Dr. Means (and I use that term loosely) is Trump’s pick for Surgeon General who had her confirmation hearing last week. If you remember from when she was nominated way back in May 2025, I like to refer to her as MAHA Gwyneth (MG), because she’s spent her post-medical-school career as a “wellness influencer.” Means went to Stanford Medical School and got an MD, but she is not a licensed physician. After doing four-and-a-half years of her five-year residency in head and neck surgery at Oregon Health and Science University, Casey dropped out. She claims that she became disillusioned with the medical system in this country. While I have no doubt that most med school grads become disheartened by the mess we call healthcare at some point during their residency, I’m still skeptical of her announcement. Putting 12 ½ years in and then quitting six months before the finish line because you’re disillusioned has the same disingenuous feel to it as when a CEO of a struggling company steps down to spend more time with their family. I’m convinced there’s more to that story. If I were Donald Trump, I might pull out the old “people are saying…”
So MG didn’t become an ENT, but she did make a lot of money. She became a wellness influencer who gets paid to complain about the system and sell you unproven work arounds. Like all good wellness influencers and manosphere podcast hosts, her bread-and-butter is supplements because these things are unregulated. Hucksters can make whatever claims they want about the ways in which their proprietary blend of organic kale powder, artisanal Vitamin B, amino acids, and bulls**t can help. But she’s also gone all-in on glucose monitors for people who don’t have diabetes. In 2019, the same year she dropped out of residency, she started a health tech company called Levels that offers blood tests and glucose monitors to people who do not have diabetes. The company’s primary product is a $40-per-month subscription service that will help you translate your data into a diet. Glucose monitoring is vital for people with diabetes, but research shows it offers no benefit to those who don’t have it. Our blood sugar is supposed to go up and down all day long and the minute-by-minute numbers don’t need decoding. Much of her confirmation hearing focused on vaccines for obvious reasons (cough, cough, measles, cough, cough). I’m sure no one will be shocked when I say she’s not a huge fan of the jabs that prevent illness, but she sidestepped much of this in her answers which could be used as a case study in obfuscation. When asked about vaccines in general she said:
Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician who should be embarrassed by how badly he was played by RFK, Jr., asked more specifically, “You’re the nation’s doctor. Would you encourage her to have her child vaccinated?” Means replied, “I’m not an individual’s doctor, and every individual needs to talk to their doctor before putting a medication in their body.” First of all, you’re damn right you’re not an individual’s doctor. You don’t have a medical license. Secondly, the job of the Surgeon General is not to be an individual’s doctor. It’s to make blanket recommendations that apply to most people and then tell everyone to talk to their own doctors about those recommendations. That’s the job. And finally, we can all see through your anti-vax coded language “… before putting a medication in their body” is straight out of the MAHA thesaurus. If we need further proof, she also said that we should keep investigating the vaccines-cause-autism claim because you know the 4,783rd study might find something different. MAHA Gwyneth is also not a fan of hormonal contraception. We knew this before her hearing because in the past she has criticized the way we “take birth control pills like candy” and said the pill had “horrifying health risks.” In an exchange with Sen. Patty Murray, Means tried to make this sound reasonable by explaining that doctors don’t have time to go over a woman’s health history to know whether she is a candidate for hormonal contraception, which means most women don’t know the risks and haven’t actually given informed consent. I agree that doctors don’t have enough time to spend with women, but the health history necessary to know whether they are or aren’t candidates for the pill includes their age, their weight, and about three other questions (Do you smoke? Have you ever had a blood clot or stroke? Have you had or do you have a family history of breast cancer?). I’ve answered these questions countless times on medical forms; it’s not hard and it doesn’t take that long. In her role as wellness influencer, Casey has been peddling the false birth-control-pills-are-way-more-dangerous-than-your-doctor-tells-you narrative for years, and this was her way of making that sound like intelligent advice rather than fearmongering. Patty Murray wasn’t fooled. There was another bit of historical rewriting in that exchange that may have gone by a little too fast to get noticed. Murray twice noted that Means had called birth control pills “a disrespect of life.” The second time Means tried to wave this away by saying, “I am passionate about women’s health, and I think it is disrespectful to women….” Murray cut her off at that moment so we don’t know exactly what she was going to say, but I’m betting it was very different than what she said on an episode of Tucker Carlson’s podcast:
This isn’t about disrespecting women by not giving them the full facts about birth control; this is about not wanting women to take the pill because you want them to keep getting pregnant. It’s not a health message; it’s pronatalist propaganda. And it’s more proof that wellness influencers peddling false narratives about the dangers of the pill have deep ties to the Project 2025 set who miss the days when women had fewer rights and more children. (Persistent Lies, the video series I made with SIECUS last year, explains this connection really clearly. If you haven’t watched it yet, now’s a great time.) Putting someone like Casey Means in charge of our nation’s public health messaging would be like putting a Fox News anchor in charge of our military strategy. Fewer Babies Are Getting Hep-B Vaccines While Still in the HospitalHaving been sufficiently stacked with anti-vaxers, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted in December 2025 to change the rules on newborn hepatitis B vaccination. Since 1991, the CDC had recommended vaccinating all newborn babies against the virus before they left the hospital. A second shot was then given at one or two months and a third between six and 18 months. This universal guidance was enormously successful—acute infections among children and teens dropped by 99% between 1990 and 2019. Despite this evidence of success, the new ACIP decided to instead recommend that only babies born to women with hepatitis B or women whose status is not known should get the vaccine while in the hospital. Parents of all other newborns should talk to their doctor and make a decision about if/when their baby will get the vaccine. It is true that most babies who get hepatitis B get it from their mothers during birth. But hep B is highly contagious because the virus can live outside the body for up to seven days on surfaces in our homes, schools, and public places. This means that there are many day-to-day activities during childhood—from nail clipping to playground accidents—that can come with the risk of exposure. Vaccinating all newborns for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth protects kids from getting it from their mother, their caregiver, or a classmate as they grow up. Prevention is important because hep B can come with chronic health issues. Babies who are infected with hepatitis B at birth or during the first year of their lives have a 90% chance of developing a chronic infection. Young children who are infected between ages one and five have about a 30% percent chance of developing a chronic infection. Chronic infection can lead to liver damage, liver failure, liver cancer, or even death. In fact, one quarter (25%) of babies and young children who develop a chronic infection will die from the disease. Unfortunately, these facts seem to have been drowned out by the roar of MAHA in the last few years. Substackers Katelyn Jetelina and Hannah Totte of Your Local Epidemiologist explain that a group of researchers recently tracked hep B vaccination trends from 2016-2025 using de-identified medical records. They wanted to see how far we had deviated from the expected trends. They found that for every 100 live births, 10 fewer newborns received the hepatitis B vaccine than models predicted. This decline began in late 2024 and now appears to be accelerating. Our local epidemiologists note that this study was done before RFK, Jr.’s stacked committee changed the rules. That suggests two things. First that anti-vaccine rhetoric messed with progress even without an explicit rule change, and second that we can expect this downward trend to continue. Jetelina and Totte conclude by saying, “Unfortunately, this research is brief, and the methods aren’t described in great detail. But clearly, we aren’t going in the right direction in protecting babies’ health and wellness.” I can’t imagine it will get better under Surgeon General Means. (There’s still time for the Senate to refuse to confirm her. They wouldn’t even have to take on her vaccine views or her hatred of contraception. They could fall back on the fact that the nation’s doctor should be at the minimum, a licensed physician. Cassidy was burned by Kennedy, but even so it’s hard to imagine this congress taking a stand on much.) Hackers Might Know What Sex Toys You HaveSex toy manufacturer Tenga was hacked. According to a message the company sent to customers, “an unauthorized party gained access to the professional email account of one of our employees.” This gave hackers access to customer names, email addresses, and—yep—details about past orders. Tenga is known for its male masturbators including sleeves, cups, and eggs that offer suction, vibration, and even music. We joke about male masturbation so freely—he was choking the chicken, spanking the monkey, polishing the snake—that it feels like there would be no shame in buying one of these toys. But this is sex in the US; there’s always shame. I can totally understand why the impacted customers would be angry and upset. Tenga has already contacted those people whose data might have been part of the breech to provide guidance such as go ahead and change your password to our site and be extra cautious about emails from people you don’t know. Not the most insightful advice. The company also promises to take steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again like requiring two factor authentication for employees’ emails. (This is pretty standard for work email these days, and the company did not say whether they already had such a system.) I’m guessing this advice was cold comfort to anyone worrying about whether their private masturbation habits were about to go public. You know what’s a good cure for anxiety, though, whether your worried about your sex toy orders or, say, war in Iran? Yep—slapping the salami. If that’s your plan, the Tenga Aero Silver Ring might come in handy. Read More Me: Epstein Files Debate Gets Pedophilia and Power WrongI have another article published on Rewire News Group this week. It’s about something that been bothering me in the press coverage around the age of Epstein survivors. It took too long to get media outlets to stop saying “underage women,” then we had Megyn Kelly sympathizing with Epstein and promising he wasn’t a real pedophile. More recently we had a member of Congress say she didn’t care about the whole mess until she found out that there were 9-year-olds involved. They’ve got it all wrong. This isn’t about age, it’s about power. See what I have to say at Rewire. 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MAHA Gwyneth Goes to Washington
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