When the White House nominated Nicole Saphier, a radiologist and Fox News contributor, for surgeon general, it marked the second time in the past month it has turned to a relatively mainstream figure for a major public health role. Now Make America Healthy Again leaders are getting worried, saying the administration is elevating conventional medical experts who might not work to advance their goals.
Saphier and Erica Schwartz , the nominee to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have both advocated for vaccines, although Saphier has called for more flexibility in the childhood vaccination schedule. They were selected as the administration seeks to smooth over controversies surrounding Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ahead of the midterm elections.
MAHA leaders criticized the Schwartz nomination, but appear even more frustrated by Trump’s pick of Saphier, who replaces their preferred candidate for the nation’s top doctor, wellness influencer and author Casey Means.
“If not Casey – we take no one!” Vani Hari, a Kennedy ally known as the Food Babe, wrote on X.
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Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA podcaster, told NOTUS that Saphier is “completely conventional medicine.”
“If this administration is trying to keep MAHA happy and keep these voters, why in the world would you hire the main messenger … to be somebody that completely disagrees with everything that they have done so far on health?” Clark said.
Saphier is a mainstream medical professional in the mold of National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya: Before joining the Trump administration, both were known for holding some unorthodox views but were nevertheless well-respected figures in their fields.
Saphier is the director of breast imaging at MSK Monmouth, a branch of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and wrote the 2020 book “Make America Healthy Again: How Bad Behavior and Big Government Caused a Trillion-Dollar Crisis.”
One former colleague of Saphier’s told NOTUS that “from a medical perspective, she has a very strong reputation.”
“She does a good job and follows the book,” the former colleague, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about another medical provider, said. “When I heard this, I was sort of like, that’s a much more moderate pick than any of his other picks.”
Saphier has pushed back against some of the administration’s messaging, including its claims linking Tylenol use during pregnancy to autism. She wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that she was “deeply concerned” about Kennedy’s hiring of David Geier, an anti-vaccine activist who has claimed, without evidence, that vaccines cause autism.
“If we want lasting change in how we diagnose, treat and perhaps prevent autism, it must be built on a foundation of rigorous science, not controversy and conspiracy theories,” Saphier wrote.
Yet Saphier, who has suggested she is the “mother” of MAHA thanks to the title of her 2020 book, has also taken positions that many MAHA voters agree with. In addition to her comments about the childhood vaccine schedule, in which she questioned whether every child needs every vaccine, she also criticized vaccine and mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“She’s no sycophant,” Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general during the first Trump administration, wrote on X. “The challenge will be maintaining that willingness to speak truth to power once she’s inside the administration instead of commenting from a Fox News studio.”
Not everyone in the public health community is convinced that will be enough.
Saphier “is qualified,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Georgetown National Center for Health Security and Resilience, wrote on X. But “just because the crazy is quieter doesn’t mean it’s gone.”
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