The federal government’s HHS.gov site states, “As the Nation’s Doctor, the Surgeon General is charged with protecting and improving the health and safety of the American people.”
But there is every reason to believe that Trump’s new nominee for that position, Nicole Saphier, will do nothing of the sort.
For one thing, despite playing a public health and infectious disease expert on TV, all her credentials are related to breast imaging and cancer. Saphier is board certified in diagnostic radiology. There is not a public health credential to be found.
That has not stopped Saphier from spouting off her anti-vax, anti-insurance, anti-health viewpoints on Fox. We at Crooks and Liars are all too familiar with Saphier’s advocacy for less health care for Americans.
In the November, 2025 video, above, Saphier revealed her “solution” for the high cost of health insurance: Have insurance cover less. She thinks it’s a great idea to go back to the days when pre-existing conditions were not covered. So, you can save a few bucks on premiums but good luck if your cancer comes back or your heart condition takes a serious turn for the worse under a different insurer!
In that same Fox News appearance, Saphier also suggested “a lot of people would benefit” from “low-cost catastrophic plans.” That means that Americans, already struggling with Trump-caused inflation, will have to shell out for almost all their medical bills until they are near death’s door.
As an emergency room doctor tasked with actually treating sick members of the public said last year, patients without health insurance “would come into the emergency department too late for me to treat them.”
That is essentially what Saphier is advocating for, while pretending to care about people getting covered.
Think Saphier has any kind of plan like that for herself and her family? She should be asked about that during her confirmation hearing.
Saphier has actually stated she thinks the Affordable Care Act gave Americans too much health insurance. She complained, in 2016, that because of the ACA, “we’re in the midst of a physician burnout and shortage crisis due to all of these newly insured patients. … We need to make our doctors happier.”
She literally advocated for the death of COVID patients on the air, too. In 2020, she said, “people that are having to be in the ICU on the ventilators, they are being kept on the ventilators from anywhere from one to four weeks. At some point, they will have to come off the ventilators. And they're either going to survive or they're either going to die.”
Other potentially lethal policies Saphier has advocated for included allowing the unvaccinated to go without face masks, in May 2021, while the COVID pandemic was still in force. In December of that year, she also advocated for eliminating vaccine mandates for children, lifting the mask mandate altogether and “accepting prior infection as form of immunity.”
That’s not counting the time she likened COVID to “the sniffles.”
While not quite as anti-vax as RFK Jr, she has certainly made a point of letting it be known she’s a friend to harder-core anti-vaxxers.
Saphier has not let her narrow medical credentials get in the way of playing an expert on mass shootings and an anti-Comey legal expert, too.
This is somebody more interested in promoting herself and her MAGA views than in promoting Americans’ health.
No president should ever have nominated her for to be surgeon general. Congress should scuttle the nomination pronto.
