Republicans advanced Dr. Nicole Saphier’s nomination out of the Senate health committee in a 12-11 party line vote, The Washington Post reported.
Unlike the Republican senators who either don’t know or don’t care about Saphier’s pro-death agenda, we at Crooks and Liars both know and care. As I wrote in May, when Donald Trump nominated the unqualified Fox News pundit to be the nation’s doctor, Saphier has a long history of putting her extremist ideology above patients’ actual lives. That’s not counting the fact that there is not a single public health credential to be found in her resumé.
Lack of credentials has not stopped Saphier from playing a public “health” expert on Fox News TV. Her prescriptions can be summed up as less health insurance and less health care, though probably not for herself, of course. We have seen Saphier complain that the ACA gave too many people the ability to see a doctor, for example. In the video above, she complained that the ACA requires coverage for too many conditions, including pre-existing conditions.
Even worse, Saphier has argued for policies that directly harm health or cause death. In 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic, she advocated for ICU patients to be taken off ventilators. She said, “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.”
Just like her likely boss-to-be, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Saphier became less anti-vax during her confirmation hearing. According to The Post, “She said that she does ‘not believe childhood vaccines cause autism’ after Cassidy initially accused her of leaving wiggle room in her response.” She also contradicted Donald Trump when she called the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine “our greatest tool for combating measles infections.”
But Saphier is not quite the vaccine friend she made herself out to be during her Senate hearing. For example, in December, 2021, she tweeted that then NYC Mayor Eric Adams should eliminate vaccine mandates for children, eliminate mask mandates altogether and “Accept prior infxn as form of immunity.”
Earlier in the year, she advocated against vaccine mandates on the Hannity show, saying, “I can tell you it's not one-size-fits-all when it comes to these vaccines.” She also chided the state of Hawaii for its mandate, saying, “they need to be more flexible.”
If Republicans were even a fraction as pro-life as they claim, they would have sent Dr. Nicole Saphier back to Fox News, where she belongs, and keep her from getting anywhere near the surgeon general’s office.
