MAHA's civil war deepens
Competitors don't make good allies
On Monday, an internal conflict in MAHA was exposed by Politico. The warring factions are Calley Means, advisor to RFK Jr and co-founder of Truemed, and The Wellness Company. Both organizations will be familiar to Conspirituality listeners, but let’s quickly review.
Truemed lets consumers use FSA and HSA money to buy a wide range of untested wellness products, including supplements, ice baths, and red light therapy devices. Means regularly says he found a “loophole” in the FSA/HSA system, though the IRS disagrees. While Truemed calls the products on its site “true-healthcare,” most have never undergone the rigors of clinical trials to prove the health claims posted on their websites.
The Wellness Company was founded by Foster Coulson, heir to a Canadian aviation and logging fortune. The company features prominent anti-vaxxers on its medical board, including Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch, and Drew Pinsky. Their suite of products include a Covid-19 vaccine “detox” and an “emergency medical kit” that includes antibiotics and ivermectin.
Both companies use telehealth to link consumers with doctors, who write scripts or “letters of recommendation” so people can purchase products on their sites. Based on their marketing materials, neither appear to be rigorous processes, which implies consumers have ready access to whatever they want—provided a fee is paid.
They both also market their products by criticizing a medical system that they claim isn’t rigorous or honest with the evidence, which brings us to a final unifying feature: both are in competition with one another to sell consumers untested and barely regulated products while making health claims in their marketing messages.
So it probably shouldn’t be surprising that these companies are now in a spat. According to Politico,
In a formal complaint to the Office of the Special Counsel and other agencies filed Saturday and obtained by POLITICO, [The Wellness Company CEO Peter] Gillooly accuses Calley Means of abusing his position at HHS and violating the law prohibiting conflict of interest in government services by threatening to involve Kennedy and National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya in the dispute.
A recording of a call between Gillooly and Means was obtained by Politico, in which Means says,
If one more thing happens, I’m going to go to Jay Bhattacharya and Bobby and tell him that you and your cadre of Peter McCullough and Kelly Victory are spreading lies and trying to fuck with him and hurt his administration.
Leaving aside the fact that this sounds more like a hall pass monitor threatening the kid who bullies them because their handmade badge affords them a moment of power, let’s look at how this feud developed.
Means accused Gillooly of feeding Laura Loomer misinformation about Truemed. Loomer recently lambasted Means’s sister, Casey, the Surgeon General nominee. Calley told Politico Gillooly shared “provably false information” with Loomer in order to embarrass a “competitor.”
With tensions already high between Loomer and the Means’s, this battle escalated thanks to this tweet:
I have no way of confirming Loomer’s claim. But I can do some math.
Wellness activists rightfully criticize evidence-based doctors only spending 15 minutes with their patients. Spending even less time with patients via telehealth isn’t a solution, however, which gives the possibility of auto-generation some possible merit.
There’s a counter on Trumed’s home page that claims the existence of “320,000 happy Truemed customers.” The longer you’re on the page, the higher it goes: every few seconds it adds between 3 and 7 new customers. If you refresh the page, it returns to 320,000 and begins again.
For a company that positions itself as providing “true-healthcare,” this marketing counter raises more than an eyebrow, especially as accuracy should be something you want from a company selling supposedly healthy products.
Let’s take Truemed at its word and pretend that they’re offering a comparable service to evidence-based doctors. Those 320,000 “happy customers” would have required 80,000 hours of telehealth consultations to provide a 15-minute consultation: 3,333 days, or 9.1 years, worth of doctor time.
Truemed launched in September 2023.
Either Truemed employs dozens of doctors who have solely devoted their careers to these telehealth calls, or, at best, those “happy customers” aren’t getting anywhere near the supposed lackluster service that evidence-based doctors provide to their patients.
This pains me to say it, but: Laura Loomer has a point.
Further thought: the egos in the upper tiers of wellness activism are already huge. While I’m sure genuine friendships and collaborations exist, MAHA is filled with opportunistic influencers trying to claw their way to the top of the pack. Minor sleights will continue to quickly expose the transactional nature of many of these collaborators.