“You can be a supporter of MAHA and not agree with every facet of it,” Dr. Nicole Saphier said last year in an exclusive interview

In the end, good energy was not enough.  

Dr. Casey Means, President Donald Trump’s second nominee for surgeon general, who rocketed to prominence in 2024 on a podcast-and-social-media-driven platform of inner peace, clean eating, and metabolic health, could not overcome the headwinds of more basic expectations for America’s top doctor. 

In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump acknowledged that Means did not have the votes required for Senate confirmation, blaming the chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, Senator Bill Cassidy, who didn’t support Means’ nomination, for being a “very disloyal person.”   

Trump announced Dr. Nicole B. Saphier as his new nominee for surgeon general, calling her a “STAR physician” and “INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR” who would make America healthy again, the slogan for the embattled movement that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is leading.  This is Trump’s third nominee for the surgeon general post.

Saphier is a radiologist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s satellite facility in Monmouth, New Jersey, and a Fox News contributor. She obtained her medical degree from Ross University School of Medicine, a private medical school headquartered in Barbados. 

How aligned she is with the MAHA movement remains unclear.  Last year in an interview, as part of my reporting for a story about the rise of Casey Means and her brother Calley, Saphier said of MAHA. “Do I think it is the end-all be-all and going to save the health care system? No, I don’t.”

Saphier added that it’s very easy for MAHA to criticize the health care system “when they’re not [working inside] it, day after day” like she has been. “I would not want to be in any other health care system,” she said. “You can be a supporter of the MAHA movement but not agree with every facet of it.”

The collapse of Means’ nomination is a blow to the MAHA movement, whose adherents advocated for her confirmation. Saphier may have expressed some skepticism that MAHA is a panacea for all that ails American medicine, but in fact has tried to claim ownership of the phrase “Make America Healthy Again.”  

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In April 2020, Saphier published a book entitled Make America Healthy Again: How Bad Behavior and Big Government Caused a Trillion Dollar Crisis. The book is a critique of the American health care system that promotes “concrete solutions” to improve America’s health, such as reducing sodium intake.  

Saphier had attempted to trademark the phrase “Make America Healthy Again” in June 2019, before publishing her book, filing an application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Rolling Stone is first to report. 

But Saphier was not at the front of the line. In August 2019, the patent and trademark office notified Saphier that her application was suspended due to a “prior-filed potentially conflicting pending application(s).” That had been filed in 2018 by Gildardo Fullen, who works in California for a construction company — but his trademark application lapsed. “Make America Healthy Again” would have belonged to Saphier, but her application was abandoned in September 2021, due to her failure to file the required paperwork. (Fullen did not respond to a request for comment.)  

In my interview with Saphier last year, she told me how she lost track of the trademark paperwork: “With the Covid pandemic underway and absolute mayhem, [with] three kids, it wasn’t on my to-do list.” She added, “Would I have liked a little shoutout? RFK Jr. may be known as the father [of MAHA], that would make me the mother. Is that something that means a lot to me? My day job is telling people they have cancer, [so] that kind of keeps it in perspective.”   

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Ultimately, while Saphier lost the trademark, Means lost her chance to become surgeon general, her unusual background looking less reliable under the glare of a Senate confirmation hearing.  

Means co-wrote the bestselling book Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, with her brother Calley Means, who is now serving as a special adviser to Health Secretary Kennedy. In polished testimony before the Senate HELP Committee in February, she made the case for a “great national healing” that makes “healthy living the easiest choice.”  

Those same senators had voted to approve Kennedy as health secretary, which has kicked off a year of explosive measles outbreaks, the chaotic dismantling of America’s vaccine infrastructure, and the spectacle of the secretary doing airport chin-ups while trailed by staggering headlines like this one from the New York Post: “RFK Jr. once chopped off a dead raccoon’s penis to ‘study later’ while on a family road trip.”  

Given all that, one might argue that unconventional is in.  

Nonetheless, unease hovered over Means’ nomination, due to her refusal to express plainspoken support for childhood vaccinations; the fact that she had not completed her surgical fellowship, dropping out shortly before its completion; and her lack of an active medical license. And as Rolling Stone previously reported, Means had promoted unsafe wellness products tainted with lead and cadmium in her “Good Energy” newsletter, receiving sponsorship fees from those brands.    

Senator Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat from Maryland, says Means “couldn’t earn the votes because she was just that unqualified.” She was “the only person to be nominated for this position who didn’t have an active medical license. She refused to be clear in her views on vaccination, and her promoting unsafe products was the greatest scam of all.” 

Means did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Saphier is Trump’s third nominee. The first, Dr. Janet Nesheiwat, also a Fox News contributor, withdrew from consideration last May after it emerged that she had falsely claimed to have graduated from an American medical school, when in fact she’d earned her medical degree from a Caribbean medical school.  

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Saphier’s medical training may yet emerge as an issue in confirmation hearings. Dr. Vin Gupta, a practicing pulmonologist who serves as a medical reservist with the U.S. Air Force, says, “This is a president that ran on America First. We heard about it all the time. But he’s nominating as America’s top physician a doctor who is not American-trained. I think that should matter. Credentials matter.” He adds, “Caribbean medical schools have known issues when it comes to quality,” referring to Saphier’s medical degree from a school in Barbados.  

Saphier and a Health and Human Services official referred questions to the White House. Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the White House, described Saphier as an “accomplished physician” who would be a “powerful asset for President Trump and work tirelessly to deliver on every facet of his MAHA agenda.”