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Trump drops embattled surgeon general pick Casey Means, announces new nominee

President Donald Trump announced a new pick for surgeon general, Nicole Saphier, putting an end to Casey Means’s nomination process that had stretched nearly a year.

Trump on Truth Social called Saphier, a Fox News contributor and radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, “an INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR, who makes complicated health issues more easily understood by all Americans.”

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Saphier was among several high-profile figures who claimed in 2022 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would mandate that schoolchildren receive coronavirus vaccines. But the claim was wrong: The CDC cannot mandate that schoolchildren receive vaccines, a decision left up to states and jurisdictions.

Saphier is Trump’s third choice to serve as the nation’s top doctor. Trump first selected Janette Nesheiwat to be surgeon general last year before the White House withdrew her nomination and put Means forward.

A health products entrepreneur and popular online personality, Means had seen her nomination stall as some Republicans questioned her stance on vaccines, her medical credentials and her pushes against the medical establishment. Means appeared before the Senate Health Committee in February after an earlier hearing was postponed after she went into labor.

“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, and many other difficult medical problems,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Trump also attacked Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, saying that Cassidy had stood in the way of Means’s confirmation. “Hopefully all of the Great Republican People of Louisiana, which I won, BIG, three times, will be voting Bill Cassidy OUT OF OFFICE in the upcoming Republican Primary!” Trump wrote.

The White House, Means, and Cassidy’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.