From the Front Lines to the Fringes: What You Need to Know About Donald Trump’s Surgeon General Pick

Dr. Janette Nesheiwat went from the mainstream to promoting hydroxychloroquine, encouraging vaccine hesitancy, and selling supplements.

Donald Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General has cast doubt on the COVID-19 vaccines and promoted anti-masking narratives along with the unproven COVID treatment, hydroxychloroquine.

Trump’s public health picks have drawn heat for their contrarian advocacy on subjects like COVID and vaccines. For example, much ink has been spilled focusing on the president-elect’s selection of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary. Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, however, has not raised alarm bells the way Trump’s other picks have. In his statement announcing her nomination on November 22, Trump lauded the doctor’s work in medical relief campaigns in the US and abroad and her work during the pandemic in NYC.

“Dr. Nesheiwat is a fierce advocate and strong communicator for preventive medicine and public health,” the statement read.“She is committed to ensuring that Americans have access to affordable, quality healthcare, and believes in empowering individuals to take charge of their health to live longer, healthier lives.”

But Nesheiwat has become a reliable contrarian voice for America’s political right as it has sought to politicize the pandemic and undermine public health. Since 2022, the doctor has been publicly against vaccinating children against COVID and masking them. Should she become surgeon general, she will be the nation’s top medical doctor and health educator, tasked with providing the most current scientific information to the public.

Nesheiwat is one of CityMD’s medical directors in New York City and during early waves of the pandemic, worked in New York City hospitals—some of the hardest hit in the nation. Back then, she frequently appeared on Fox News as one of their medical contributors, as well as on CBS News, Good Morning America and MSNBC. In her appearances, her advice was generally consistent with public health authorities on topics like masking and social distancing.

But even back then, there were indications of a rightward drift, like her embrace of hydroxychloroquine, a drug Trump had latched onto as a potential game-changer in his push to reopen the country ahead of the election. In a May 2020 Fox News interview, she said it was “very smart” for President Trump to take the drug as a prophylactic to protect against a potential COVID infection. At the time, the Mayo Clinic was warning those in healthcare to not use hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine on people outside of hospitals or clinical trials.

Nesheiwat went on to tell host Neil Cavuto that she herself, as a doctor “on the front lines of this pandemic here in New York City,” had prescribed the drug to some of her patients for COVID.

“And for some of them, they said it helped tremendously,” she said. “Some of them, it didn’t make much of a change.” Weeks later, the FDA ended the emergency use of the medication. Nesheiwat stood by her advocacy as recently as June 2021, chiming in on a tweet by Fox News host Laura Ingraham attacking a Washington Post article critical of Trump’s promotion of the drug.

“I prescribed hydroxychloroquine to some of my covid patients in New York and it helped them,” she wrote.

Nesheiwat also got on board with school reopening in the summer of 2020 before vaccines were available but just as right-wing dark money groups and Trump were pushing the issue, vilifying teachers unions as holdouts. In a July 2020 appearance on Fox News, she downplayed concerns about children getting and spreading COVID.

“The benefits of having children in the classroom far outweigh the risk of coronavirus,” she claimed, citing a study showing lower risk of death for that age group compared to older Americans.

As it turned out, COVID would be a leading cause of death in U.S. children—and kids played a key role in spreading the virus in their households. Hundreds of thousands are estimated to have lost a primary or secondary caregiver to COVID.

Still, Nesheiwat’s public health takes remained mostly consistent with the mainstream through 2021. She encouraged masking, testing, social distancing, and vaccination. In February of that year, she even called the COVID jabs a “gift from God” and “our path out of the pandemic” in a Fox News op-ed.

Yet, when she launched her vitamin brand, BC Boost, in late 2022, she began propping up the use of vitamins to fight illnesses like COVID. By then, she had also become decidedly less bullish on vaccinations—particularly for young people.

In a Fox News interview in September 2022, for example, Nesheiwat suggested that the new bivalent boosters were not sufficiently tested for her to recommend them to young “healthy people” with “natural immunity.”

“I don’t want a 19-year-old, young, healthy person who’s already had COVID and has natural immunity to go rush out and get this booster,” she told Cavuto. “That would be inappropriate—premature to get it at this time.”

Nesheiwat’s comments ran counter to the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had begun recommending COVID vaccination for young people ages 12 and up earlier that month.

The following month on the day news broke that a CDC group recommended adding COVID shots to the childhood vaccines schedules, she came out against the idea, declaring in a tweet that “If CDC approves a covid vaccine addition to the routine schedule of vax for kids, it will mark the most egregious unethical & harmful decision to children.”

“No mandates,” she wrote. “Especially for a vax that can’t prevent disease. May God give them the wisdom & courage to vote appropriately.”

In an interview the next month on Tucker Carlson, Nesheiwat suggested that the CDC was recommending children get the vaccine because “maybe profit.”

“There’s no good reason to have a vaccine that can’t stop disease, can’t stop transmission of disease on this schedule vaccination,” she said. Although imperfect, the COVID vaccines have been shown to reduce transmission.

Nesheiwat was also a vocal opponent of masking children, coinciding with a larger push by right-wing dark money groups and their Republican allies.

For example, in August 2022, responding to a New York Post article about a Philadelphia school district requiring children ages 3 to 5 to mask for the school year, Nesheiwat tweeted, “This is wrong. Do not mask toddlers. Who is making these illogical decisions?”

”It’s more harmful than helpful to mask a 3 year old all day & all year long,” Nesheiwat claimed. “Speech, facial expression, social & emotional development, communication etc all negatively impacted.”

There is little evidence of developmental harm to children from masking. In fact, three months after Nesheiwat’s tweet, Diane Paul, a doctor, audiologist and senior director of Clinical Issues in Speech-Language Pathology at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association told the Center for Media and Democracy that while more research was needed, her organization was “not aware of studies that directly assessed the long-term impact on speech and language development when young children interact with adults who are wearing facemasks.”

“However, there are studies demonstrating children can tune into different communication clues and gestures when an adult’s mouth is not visible,” she explained.

A study published this July found that after a year of masking, toddlers were able to overcome initial limitations and even exhibited “an enhanced ability to interpret emotions from masked facial expressions.”

More recently, Nesheiwat has embraced the right-wing narrative that the cost of government efforts to control the pandemic were possibly worse than the virus itself, which has killed 1.2 million Americans to date. That position has brought her in line with more controversial Trump public health picks like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Marty Makary—set to lead the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, respectively. In April 2023, for example, Nesheiwat penned a Fox News opinion piece claiming that “For most Americans, the collateral damage was worse than the pandemic.”

“The mandate intentions had deleterious impacts – it reduced our military personnel, we lost good firefighters, police officers, teachers, healthcare providers and even athletes who refused to capitulate to the out-of-date, CDC regulations,” she wrote.

Medical professionals we spoke to expressed reservations about Trump’s selection of Nesheiwat for surgeon general. Dr. Robert Morris, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington School of Public Health, told Important Context that Trump’s choice of the doctor “fits with his pattern of picking candidates based on their conventional and social media reach and their support for fringe viewpoints rather than their demonstrated expertise and experience in the field.”

Dr. Natalia Solenkova, a Florida-based intensivist affiliated with the American Medical Association, noted that “while Dr. Nesheiwat supported some beneficial approaches during the COVID-19 pandemic, her refusal to advocate for measures like masking and vaccinating children, while pushing for early school reopenings, highlights an inconsistent application of evidence-based medicine.”

“We cannot selectively choose the evidence we support when presenting ourselves as advocates for science,” Solenkova said.

A frontline doctor at the height of the pandemic, Solenkova took issue with Nesheiwat’s supplement business as well, telling Important Context, “I remain cautious about trusting physicians who promote and sell self-created supplements under the guise of improving immunity.”

“It raises serious ethical concerns when unsubstantiated claims are made to market such products,” she explained. “Does the supplement do what is claimed? Is there data to support its effectiveness? In my opinion, the answers are clear, and it is unethical to make unsupported claims in order to profit."

Despite her evolution from COVID vaccine champion to skeptic, Nesheiwat was not Robert Kennedy Jr.’s pick for surgeon general.

According to The Financial Times, the nomination was a surprise to the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and HHS nominee. Shortly after the announcement, Kennedy allies, fellow anti-vaxxers Del Bigtree of Informed Consent Action Network and vaccine injury attorney Aaron Siri invited Nesheiwat to a meeting at Kennedy’s home in Florida that was described as a “re-education camp” on vaccines.