How Dr. Oz Hyped Trump’s COVID Snake Oil

Now he’s Trump’s pick to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

On the heels of nominating anti-vax conspiracist and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Department of Health and Human Services secretary, President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated fellow showman and failed 2022 Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). In his announcement on Truth Social, Trump highlighted Oz’s Daytime Emmy wins and proclaimed the doctor to have given “a strong voice to key pillars of the MAHA movement.” 

While the “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, spearheaded by Kennedy, has marketed itself as a fight against chronic disease, the true MAHA agenda appears to be gutting public health institutions, per the Project 2025 plan, in the wake of the COVID pandemic. Trump and his allies are reportedly eyeing major slashes to Medicaid in order to carry out tax cuts for the wealthy elite. Oz has previously said that uninsured Americans have no “right to health” and has been paid to promote Medicare privatization.

Beyond his plans for the critical agency he has been chosen to run, Oz was also implicated in one of Trump’s major public health blunders in 2020. 

During the first year of the pandemic, Oz was part of Team Trump’s promotion of a failed COVID-19 miracle cure, hydroxychloroquine. So was Kennedy, who promoted the drug in the summer of 2020 alongside future insurrectionist and leader of the pro-Trump group America’s Frontline Doctors Dr. Simone Gold after it had been disproven against the virus in a major US study. The drug also carries known cardiac risks, and AFLDS now faces a hydroxychloroquine-for-COVID wrongful death lawsuit.

Oz appears in the 2022 House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (HSSCC) report “A Knife-Fight with the FDA” about the Trump administration’s relentless promotion of the anti-malarial drug for COVID throughout 2020 by MAGA loyalists including Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Former Director of the White House National Trade Council Peter Navarro. 

A March 23, 2020 email obtained by the subcommittee showed Oz messaging Trump’s son-in-law and former advisor Jared Kushner, urging him to rush the drug:

I am funding our study at Columbia but know this is a plodding process which will take a month before we have results. We must make completion of this study a national priority and insist on immediate enrollment. It has been almost a week since we learned of the French data and over a month since the Chinese data and we still have no patients in trials. Doctors and nurses are already struggling to find pills for off-label use, but at least we have a potential pandemic solution at our finger tips (sic). 

The French research into hydroxychloroquine for COVID was from Dr. Didier Raoult, whose work raised alarms within the scientific community and who has since faced a slew of retractions and revelations of past research ethics issues. 

A week before Oz’s email to Kushner, Elon Musk posted a Google Doc “white paper” to Twitter that cited Raoult, stating, “Maybe worth considering chloroquine for C19” and “This paper matches what I’m hearing from a lot of smart people.” As reporting from WhoWhatWhy earlier this year detailed, this public boost from Musk–whose own foundation was backing hydroxychloroquine research–kicked off a right-wing media frenzy about the drug leading to Trump promoting it, despite a lack of strong evidence for its efficacy.

Oz got in on the hydroxychloroquine media hullabaloo as well. The same day he emailed Kushner, the television doctor appeared on Fox News’s Fox and Friends and The Ingraham Angle to discuss the French research as well as his own trial at Columbia University. Like Oz, Laura Ingraham would personally lobby the Trump White House to push hydroxychloroquine for COVID. 

Also in March 2020, Oz reportedly personally spent thousands of dollars buying up hydroxychloroquine doses amid a rush on the drug that caused shortages for people with chronic conditions who require it for daily use. Additionally, Oz owned shares of companies that make the drug while he was promoting its use for COVID.   

Of course, hydroxychloroquine was not nearly the first time the cardiothoracic surgeon-turned-celebrity over-promised on a quick health fix – or promoted questionable scientists. 

Oz is best known for his lucrative television work promising miracle health/diet cures often lacking supporting evidence, which eventually got him in trouble with Congress. The doctor appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Insurance in 2014 for a hearing on false advertising in the weight loss industry. One member of the subcommittee went so far as to tell Oz that “the scientific community is almost monolithic against you.” Columbia quietly cut ties with Oz in 2022.

The 2014 hearing was brought up during his Senate run in 2022, with various scientists calling him both unfit for office and to be a doctor. Oz’s involvement in the hydroxychloroquine debacle, and appearance in the HSSCC’s 2022 report, should be brought up in light of his CMS nomination.

Posting to X, Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, wrote: “Dr Oz is unfit to run CMS.”

“He peddles conspiracy theories on vaccines & fake cures,” Gostin wrote. “He profits from fringe medical ideas. By nominating RFK Jr & Mehmet Oz, Trump is giving his middle finger to science. Having worked for 40 years in public health, it's utterly disheartening.”

Brad Woodhouse, executive director of Protect Our Care, which has launched an effort to stop Kennedy’s HHS nomination, had similarly strong words in an official statement about Oz’s nomination to head the CMS, accusing the television star of having “exploited the public’s trust in him as a doctor to push quack medical cures, such as fad diets and the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, in order to line his own pockets.” 

“He is a grifter and a threat to public health,” the statement read. “Dr. Oz and RFK Jr. at the helm of our country’s health care administration will only lead us into a disaster unlike any other. The American people deserve better than this clown show running American health care.”