Janette Nesheiwat, a family medicine doctor who runs a chain of urgent care clinics, is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for surgeon general ― one of the nation’s leading voices on matters of public health.
She’s a fixture on Fox News, home to several of Trump’s other intended Cabinet nominees. And she’s long been a vocal Trump supporter: Her social media accounts feature videos of Trump wishing her a happy birthday, selfies with him on the White House lawn and pictures with members of his inner circle at his Madison Square Garden rally. Her sister, Julia Nesheiwat, also served as Trump’s homeland security adviser during his last year in office.
If she’s confirmed by the Senate, she’ll be expected to set the tone on how the government approaches Americans’ medical concerns, launch programs to promote healthy lifestyles and weigh in on ongoing public health issues, from the opioid epidemic to youth nicotine use. And she’ll also oversee the 6,000 members of the United States Public Health Service Corps. Here’s what else there is to know about her:
She’s a recent Fox News medical contributor with little public health experience.
Nesheiwat, the medical director for a New York-area urgent care clinic network, has been a Fox News medical contributor since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. She’s appeared in segments as recently as last month, but Fox News told HuffPost on Tuesday she’s no longer with the network.
On her website and social media, she’s shared about her medical missions to Ukraine and Morocco.
But overall, her public health experience is thin compared to that of the current surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, who also served under former President Barack Obama and was involved in multiple nationwide health care efforts prior to taking the job.
Fox News has called on Nesheiwat to weigh in on all sorts of medical stories. When Trump began taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine to ward off COVID-19, Nesheiwat came on to say it was a “smart” idea and that she’d prescribed it to some of her patients infected with the virus.
At the time, no testing had established the effectiveness of using hydroxychloroquine, which has substantial potential harms, to prevent COVID-19. The World Health Organization later said that after completing six trials, it did not recommend taking hydroxychloroquine to either prevent or treat the disease.
Nesheiwat emphasized the importance of consulting with a doctor before trying out the drug. But people found ways around that. After Trump began promoting the drug, a man in Arizona died from ingesting a chloroquine-containing aquarium product.
She sells her own brand of dietary supplements.
Nesheiwat is behind a dietary supplement called BC Boost that contains vitamins C, B-12, D and zinc. The product, which features her image on the bottle, claims that within a few weeks, “your immune system will still be strengthened.”
“I was always telling my patients who were unwell drink some tea, take some vitamin b12 and vitamin C,” she says on a website advertising the supplement. “I found myself repeating my all natural regimen to my patients over and over ‘take some B12 and C to Boost’ your immune system.”
Medical experts and public health agencies say that for the vast majority of people, the best way to get those vitamins is through a healthy diet. Overconsumption of certain nutrients — including some of the vitamins in BC Boost’s product, albeit at higher doses — may lead to serious health problems, including kidney stones and heart rhythm issues.
While the supplement industry is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, the agency does not consider supplements to be medicine, and companies are not required to prove that their products are effective.
A 30-day supply of Nesheiwat’s product costs $26.99.
She’s praised vaccines but slammed vaccine mandates.
Nesheiwat has been a big proponent of the COVID-19 vaccine for adults, saying its benefits “greatly outweigh” any short-lived side effects and describing it as “a gift from God.”
But in the years since the peak of the pandemic, Nesheiwat has expressed opposition to vaccine requirements. “To mandate vaccines, at this point, I think, is the wrong move,” she said on Fox News in the summer of last year.
She also blamed vaccine mandates for negatively affecting the U.S. workforce. “We lost good firefighters, police officers, teachers, healthcare providers and even athletes who refused to capitulate to the out-of-date, CDC regulations,” she wrote in an opinion piece for Fox News in April 2023.
In that same piece, Nesheiwat claimed mask and vaccine mandates were ineffective because the virus continued to spread, even with these measures in place. But she at least partially credited the shots for easing the pandemic: “With time,” she wrote, “the severity decreased most likely due to population immunity and re-infection along with vaccination.”
Nesheiwat has also questioned giving the COVID-19 vaccine to children. In late 2021, she said on Fox News that “a booster or third dose might cause … a rare form of myocarditis or pericarditis,” which are types of heart inflammation, in young boys. She failed to mention that such side effects following a vaccine are very rare, and that patients are much more likely to develop those conditions following COVID-19 infection than they are from the vaccine.
She’s spoken out against treatments for transgender kids.
During a 2022 Fox News appearance, Nesheiwat acknowledged that transgender children exist and urged their parents to “accept them and love them for who they are,” noting that rates of suicide attempts among transgender kids are significantly higher than that of their cisgender peers.
Democracy In The Balance
Support HuffPost
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
Despite acknowledging that, she claimed the medical establishment is “only wanting to push drugs and hormones and other types of surgical interventions, rather than taking a conservative approach, such as psychotherapy.”
It’s false that doctors are pushing those types of treatments on children. A 2022 Reuters report found that only around 10% of 42,167 children ages 6-17 who’d been diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021 were prescribed hormone or puberty blocker treatments. Among those with the diagnosis, a mere 0.6% of them received gender-affirming top surgery.
Nesheiwat’s stance on this issue is out of step with that of every major medical group in the United States, which have determined that gender-related medical care is effective and medically necessary.
She’s also accused Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra of focusing about transgender health care at the expense of addressing sexually transmitted infections and spoken out against transgender athletes’ inclusion in women’s sports.
