President Donald Trump has pulled his surgeon general nomination of Casey Means, M.D., and announced a new pick to become the nation’s doctor: Nicole Saphier, M.D., a radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering and a Fox News medical contributor.
The shift comes nearly a year after the initial nomination of Means, an author, blogger and health tech company co-founder. Her confirmation process was repeatedly delayed due to her pregnancy and, more recently, an unconvincing showing in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) committee.
Means is an influential voice in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement and the sister of Calley Means, a key advisor to the movement’s political figurehead, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She holds a medical degree from Stanford but dropped out of her surgical residency to open a holistic health practice and voluntarily placed her medical license on inactive status.
The former nominee had sought to skirt the line on controversial topics like vaccine advocacy during her Capitol Hill confirmation hearing, sidestepping a direct response on whether she would broadly recommend long-supported pediatric vaccines while stressing that any parent should seek “informed consent with their doctor before getting any medication.” Insider reports during the weeks following the hearing suggested she was struggling to secure the needed votes from key Republican moderates on the HELP committee due to doubts over her stance on the issue, as well as descriptions of past psychedelic drug use in her 2024 book.
Trump, in the online post, placed blame for Means’ failed nomination squarely at the feet of Senate HELP Chair Bill Cassidy, M.D., R-Louisiana. The physician and leading healthcare legislator has clashed with Kennedy over the secretary’s upheaval of the pediatric vaccine schedule and his ousting of former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez, Ph.D., but has otherwise tried to stay in MAHA’s good graces ahead of this year’s midterms against a MAHA-aligned primary challenger.
However, Trump said Cassidy had “stood in the way” of the nomination “for months,” while describing the senator as “a very disloyal person” and referencing his prior vote to impeach the president in January 2021.
“Despite Senator Cassidy’s intransigence and political games, Casey will continue to fight for MAHA on the many important Health issues facing our Country, such as the rising childhood disease epidemic, increased autism rates, poor nutrition, over-medicalization and researching the root causes of infertility,” Trump wrote.
Saphier, meanwhile, was described by the president as “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. She is also an INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR, who makes complicated health issues more easily understood by all Americans.”
Saphier practices radiology full-time and is listed as the director of breast imaging at a Memorial Sloan Kettering facility in Middletown, New Jersey. She received her medical degree from the Ross University School of Medicine in Barbados, was a resident at Maricopa Integrated Health Systems and had a fellowship at Mayo Clinic, according to her profile on Memorial Sloan Kettering’s website.
Saphier is the author of three books, including 2020’s “Make America Healthy Again: How Bad Behavior and Big Government Caused a Trillion-Dollar Crisis,” which predates the MAHA branding embraced by Kennedy during his 2024 presidential run; as well as 2021’s “Panic Attack: Playing Politics with Science in the Fight Against COVID-19,” which broadly criticized economic shutdowns and other pandemic responses as “anti-science.”
Both women’s nominations followed the White House’s short-lived bid for Janette Nesheiwat, M.D., another Fox News contributor, which was pulled amid criticisms from those in the president’s sphere on her COVID-19 public health positions and questions over whether she had misrepresented her educational background.