Trump Surgeon General Pick Celebrated DOGE Research Cuts, Called to Halt mRNA Vaccines for Children, and Expressed Anti-Trans Views
Nicole Saphier has promoted a number of unproven public health narratives favored by the right.
Donald Trump’s new surgeon general nominee defended the administration’s research cuts, previously urged public health officials to pause vaccinating children against COVID-19, and has suggested transgender identities are driven by a “fad.”
On Thursday, the White House announced radiologist and supplements entrepreneur Nicole Saphier as the president’s next pick for surgeon general. Saphier, a Fox News regular, is the president’s third pick for the position. She follows wellness influencer Casey Means, whose views on vaccines and lack of an active medical license stalled her nomination, and physician Janet Nesheiwat, who withdrew amid controversy over her credentials.
Saphier, who works at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, has an active medical license and is reportedly favored by experts for Senate confirmation. However, her past media appearances and social media posts paint the picture of a partisan and medical contrarian. As surgeon general, Saphier would not make policy directly, but could influence it with guidance
“One of the Greatest Things to Happen In U.S. History”
Last year, Saphier defended the Trump administration’s cuts to cancer research amid public backlash, praising Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“I have a lot of colleagues who are really upset right now. They’re very concerned that the funding for the research that they’re doing is going to be cut off,” she said on Fox. “I mean, we do a lot of valuable research in the cancer community—and I keep telling people, like, you just have to give it a pause right now.”
“I think DOGE is probably one of the greatest things to happen in U.S. history, but change is hard,” she continued.
For years, Saphier served as a medical voice supporting Republicans—and the Trump administration. Saphier has been a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act, criticizing the law in her 2020 book, “Make America Healthy Again,” which coined the slogan long before HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. began using it. The book blamed the nation’s healthcare woes on “big government” and Americans’ “bad habits.” She has also expressed support for work requirements for Medicaid recipients—56 percent of whom are children, or disabled, or seniors.
When the pandemic hit, Saphier was one of the few doctors praising the Trump pandemic response and backing his calls to reopen in the spring of 2020. In April that year, she earned praise from the president on Twitter for an appearance on Fox.
Saphier quoted the post with a ‘thank you’ message and pinned it to her profile for the rest of the year. The following month, she defended the president against criticism over his rollout of COVID tests.
“For anyone who says @realDonaldTrump is not taking testing and the health of Americans seriously, this press conference directly contradicts that criticism,” she wrote.
Weeks later, Trump suggested scaling back testing would result in fewer cases. Two months later, the administration did just that.
“Why Did the Media Hate Hydroxychloroquine So Much?”
Throughout 2020, Saphier straddled a line between the mainstream of public health and supporting the president’s push to reopen the country ahead of the election. On May 5 that year, Saphier characterized COVID-related shutdowns as “authoritarian measures,” writing that she feared they would spark “civil unrest” and “more of a rebound spike in COVID19 cases rather than if businesses would be allowed to open up with smart measures in place to protect their employees and ensure safety of consumers choosing to go out.”
Saphier frequently reposted tweets from Marty Makary, today the commissioner of the FDA. The pair published a piece in MedPage Today in early May 2020 calling for a national standard for diagnosing COVID—to guide reopening.
The article states that “approximately 10-85 times more people have been infected than are entered into most public health tracking systems,” and suggests many excess deaths in New York may have been due to people avoiding medical care for other conditions.
The “85 times” figure came from a controversial seroprevalence study from Santa Clara County on which the current NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya, was an author.
Saphier’s positions appear to have hardened as COVID became a bigger wedge issue for the right. In May 2021, before the deadly delta variant wave, she declared that the U.S. was on the verge of herd immunity. In a Fox News op-ed days later, she said the emergency was over and called for “emaskipation” by Memorial Day.
That same month, Saphier’s book, “Panic Attack,” was published, arguing that fear had taken hold of the country as a result of the pandemic. Saphier described the text in an appearance on Fox the following month, teasing support for a spectrum of right-wing positions and unproven narratives favored by Trump and his allies.
“I challenge: Why weren’t we allowed to discuss the possibility of a lab leak?” she said, referencing the highly speculative notion that the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged from a lab—evidence has consistently pointed to natural origins. “Why did the media hate hydroxychloroquine so much? Why, all of the sudden, was Dr. Fauci deemed the white knight and President Trump the villain?”
Trump and his former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, clashed in the spring of 2020 over the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine, which the president promoted as a “game changer” against COVID despite limited clinical evidence. Fauci publicly cautioned that the drug’s promise was based on anecdotal evidence. Subsequent high-quality, large-scale studies showed hydroxychloroquine to be ineffective against the pandemic virus.
“Did that really turn out to be true?” Saphier continued. “All of the sudden, you saw big tech censorship of any contrarian opinions, many of which actually have turned out to be true. And then I actually divulge [sic] into: were those lockdown protesters right all along?”
”Yet All Kids Need to Wear Masks”
One of Saphier’s major focuses throughout the pandemic was COVID mitigation efforts in schools, which studies have shown were sources of COVID transmission. A parent herself, she argued closures might cause more harm than good as early as March 2020. By May 2021, she was lambasting teachers unions—a frequent target or right-wing ire—blaming them for closures and “proven harms” to children.
Saphier also blasted school mask requirements, which studies have shown reduced transmission of the virus—for years, a leading cause of death among children.
“To be clear, the risk of an adult dying from Covid-19 after vax AND the risk of an unvax child dying from Covid are BOTH < 0.01%,” she wrote in July 2021. “The risk of a kid dying from Covid after they’ve recovered from an infection & without risk factors is even less. Yet, all kids need to wear masks.”
“The Newborn Probably Doesn’t Need This Vaccine”
On the issue of vaccines, Saphier has been inconsistent. In June 2022, she signed onto an open letter to then-CDC Director Rochelle Walenski and Coronavirus response coordinator Ashish Jha arguing against the CDC recommendation that children receive COVID vaccines.
The letter was from Urgency of Normal, a right-wing medical group that formed to fight COVID mitigation in schools, and once counted among its members ousted director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad and Tracy Beth Høeg, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
“We strongly urge you to revise the CDC’s COVID-19 guidelines with regards to testing, isolation, and vaccine recommendations for children to ensure that public health policies are not doing more harm than good,” it read.
In a July 2021 tweet, she noted that Missouri, with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the U.S., was experiencing a surge in COVID cases while Vermont, with the highest vaccination rate, was reporting the fewest new cases.
“It’s not a coincidence,” she wrote.
At the same time, however, two months earlier, she called to pause COVID vaccinations for children, writing, “As a physician and mother of three boys, my question is, if the vaccine successfully induces an immune response, which some studies suggest may be more robust than natural exposure to the virus, then could the vaccine incite the inflammatory reaction resulting in MIS-C?”
Research has shown that children with no history of COVID infection are extremely unlikely to get MIS-C; that vaccines are safe for children with a history of the condition and indeed provide strong protection against it.
In September, she questioned the childhood immunization schedule, suggesting that the universal hepatitis B recommendation, which the Trump administration recently did away with, was unnecessary.
“My opinion is if a woman recently tested negative for hepatitis B and they’re living a low-risk lifestyle, no IV drug use, not a sex worker, they don’t have a hepatitis B positive person living in the home, then the newborn probably doesn’t need this vaccine and we can have a conversation about whether or not they should get the vaccine later in life,” she said on a podcast.
In February 2025, renowned vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit told Important Context that infants infected with hepatitis B in the first few months of life “have a 90 percent chance of going on to develop cirrhosis or liver cancer.”
More recently, she questioned a decision to drop mandatory flu vaccinations for troops by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a personal friend from Fox who previously defended against allegations of unprofessional conduct.
“It’s a Bit of a Trend Right now”
One thing Saphier has been consistent on is her opposition to gender-affirming care for minors and skepticism of transgender identities, which major medical organizations recognize.
Saphier, however, has suggested gender diversity is linked to mental illness. On an episode of her Wellness Unmasked podcast in February, she hosted Claire Abernathy, who “detransitioned”—a rare phenomenon.
During her introduction, Saphier cited mental health and suicide statistics for transgender high school students, asking “Were they mentally ill before they came out as trans or did they come out of trans and then they were dealing with some mental illness?”
“What I’m seeing over and over again is you have these subset of kids—a lot of them which have unstable home environment, some sort of home stressor…and one thing that they’re grabbing onto, because it’s a bit of a trend right now and there’s a strong support, is to be transgender,” she said.
Research has found that suicidal behavior among transgender individuals is driven by external factors like societal prejudice, rejection by family, friends, and community, and discrimination in healthcare.