Dr. Nicole Saphier on Fox News Channel
President Donald Trump has nominated yet another Fox News pundit for a major position in his administration.
He announced Thursday that he’s chosen Nicole Saphier as his pick to be surgeon general. Saphier distinguished herself at Fox as one of the biggest medical misinformers on COVID-19 and a shameless shill for Trump.
Saphier got the nod after Trump’s previous nominee, influencer Casey Means—who lacks a medical license—saw her nomination jammed up in the Senate.
“Nicole is a STAR physician who has spent her career guiding women facing breast cancer through their diagnosis and treatment while tirelessly advocating to increase early cancer detection and prevention, while at the same time working with men and women on all other forms of cancer diagnoses and treatments,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
If her nomination is successful, Saphier will join the ever-growing ranks of Fox characters who litter this administration—including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro.
According to Media Matters for America, Saphier has made at least 640 appearances on Fox over the years. The right-wing propaganda network is obsessively watched by Trump and wields enormous influence over his actions.
Saphier primarily focuses on medical issues. Her stance, as expressed in her book Make America Healthy Again, is that people experience medical issues because of “lifestyle” choices.
“If Americans want to know why their health care is so costly and getting costlier, they need only look in the mirror,” she posits in the blurb for her book.
In this worldview, poor policy decisions, corporate greed, and other external factors play no role in ailments like cancer or heart disease. It remains to be seen how something like childhood cancer could stem from one’s “lifestyle.”
As COVID-19 ravaged the world in 2020, Saphier became one of Fox’s primary figures promoting quack takes on how Trump was handling the pandemic.
For instance, Saphier argued that Trump deserved praise for focusing on economic issues, even as he ignored advisories from medical experts. While Trump argued that COVID-19 was not a major concern and that the summer heat would kill it, Saphier said that he was doing an adequate job.
“The economic and emotional toll from misinformation is going to hit us much harder than this virus is in itself,” she said at the time.
As recently as September 2025, Saphier was still pushing COVID-19 misinformation, arguing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “lost all credibility throughout the COVID pandemic when they continued to universally recommend the COVID vaccine.”
And when she wasn’t making outlandish comments about the response to COVID-19, Saphier was a dedicated cheerleader for Trump and the GOP.
After the Trump administration pursued its widely condemned family separation immigration policy in 2018, Saphier argued that it was medically acceptable to house immigrant children “in cages or in windowless rooms.”
She also complained about the Affordable Care Act requiring insurance companies to cover serious illnesses that were previously denied, insisted that expanding Medicare would make the program worse, claimed that the ACA made people die from preventable illnesses, and lied about the GOP plan to kill the ACA, falsely claiming that it wouldn’t rescind coverage for preexisting conditions.
When she wasn’t opining and misinforming on medical issues, Saphier also engaged in typical Fox culture war bigotry. For instance, she alleged—without evidence—that a transgender fencer had gone through gender-affirming care purely to have a competitive advantage.
“These men can’t cut it with the other male athletes, so therefore they are coming into the female sports,” she said.
Trump’s senior leadership already looks like a Fox News broadcast. If Saphier joins the ranks, the network’s lies and bigotry will play an even greater role in U.S. health care.
Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Casey Means does not have a medical degree, which is incorrect. She does not have a medical license.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
- Trump Picks Nicole Saphier for Surgeon General After Withdrawing Casey Means Nomination - The New York Times ›
- Trump nominates radiologist Nicole Saphier for surgeon general : NPR ›
- Trump pulls controversial surgeon general pick and makes third nomination for the role | CNN Politics ›
- White House drops surgeon general pick Casey Means, announces new nominee - The Washington Post ›
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