Trump fills out his key public health roles
By Kaanita Iyer, Katherine Dillinger and Jamie Gumbrecht, CNN
(CNN) — President-elect Donald Trump has announced his picks for critical remaining public health roles in his incoming administration.
Trump named Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as US surgeon general; Dr. Marty Makary as US Food and Drug Administration commissioner; Dr. Dave Weldon, a former congressman from Florida, as director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health.
The announced selections come as some in the public health world have already expressed concern over the president-elect’s intention to elevate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, to the nation’s top health post as secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services. Trump’s picks paint a fuller picture of what the health agency would look like under Kennedy, if confirmed by the US Senate.
A person familiar with the search told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Kennedy played a key role in selecting the names to fill out the department, including the FDA commissioner and the CDC director.
The appointees, if also confirmed, will fall under the purview of Kennedy, who has emphasized the importance of ridding the department and its agencies of corruption. Trump, for his part, said on the campaign trail that he would let Kennedy “go wild on health.”
US surgeon general
Also known as “the nation’s doctor,” the surgeon general is a medical doctor who focuses on educating and advising Americans on how to improve their health. He or she issues advisories, reports and calls to action to offer the best available scientific information on crucial issues. He or she also serves as vice admiral of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, overseeing this group of uniformed officers who seek to promote the nation’s health.
Nominees for surgeon general must be confirmed by the Senate to serve.
Nesheiwat is a family practice doctor and Fox News medical contributor who is certified by the American Board of Family Medicine. She attended medical school at the American University of the Caribbean in St. Maarten, according to her New York state physician profile, and did postgraduate work at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
“We’re coming up on the five-year anniversary of Covid,” Nesheiwat said Sunday on a Fox News segment about mpox. “And if you remember, under the President Trump administration’s leadership, you’ll recall that we had incredible public health policies, President Trump’s unparalled creation of Operation Warp Speed was one like we’ve never seen before. And that’s a vaccine that saved thousands of lives, and we still saw lives saved even after President Trump left office.”
FDA commissioner
The commissioner of food and drugs oversees the FDA, which is responsible for the safety, efficacy and security of medications, biological products, medical devices, food and cosmetics. Vaccine authorization or approval falls under the FDA’s purview. It also regulates the manufacturing, marketing and distribution of tobacco products.
The commissioner is traditionally a medical doctor, and nominees are subject to Senate confirmation.
Makary is a surgeon and researcher at Johns Hopkins University. He received a medical degree from Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University and attended graduate school at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, Johns Hopkins says, and helped lead the World Health Organization patient safety program.
Makary, like Nesheiwat, has Fox News ties. In an opinion piece published on Fox News at the height of the pandemic in 2021, Makary argued that Covid-19 had revealed the FDA to be a “broken” administration “mired in politics and red tape.”
The agency moved too slowly in its authorization of the antiviral pill molnupiravir, he said, and stubbornly clung to its recommendations on Covid vaccine spacing. “It’s time for our old guard medical leaders to step aside into advisory roles and let new scientists, ones who are not afraid to speak up, take charge,” he wrote.
He became a paid contributor for the network as the pandemic wound down in March 2024 and remained in the role through mid-2024, according to a Fox News spokesperson. He appeared on Fox News Sunday earlier this week to endorse Kennedy as HHS secretary.
During the pandemic, Makary was a proponent of the importance of natural immunity derived from Covid-19 infection.
In February 2021, he predicted in the Wall Street Journal that this natural immunity would help the nation achieve herd immunity to the coronavirus within two months. Later that year, he wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that workers who had natural immunity and who had been fired for not being fully vaccinated should be reinstated. “The superiority of natural immunity over vaccinated immunity is clear.”
CDC director
The director of the CDC leads the nation’s foremost public health agency, which deals with disease prevention and control and environmental health. Among his or her most prominent duties is making final recommendations on vaccinations and immunization schedules. He or she also serves as administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which responds to large-scale hazardous exposures such as chemical spills.
Formerly appointed by the president, the CDC director position will be subject to Senate confirmation beginning in January.
Weldon got a medical degree from SUNY-Buffalo on an Army scholarship and did postgraduate training in internal medicine at the Letterman Army Medical Center. He served six years in active duty and eight in the Army Reserve, according to a biography on his US Senate campaign website. He is certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine.
“As a physician, Dr. Weldon became involved with many health care policy issues, including efforts to ban human cloning and vaccine safety,” the campaign website notes. “He helped lead the effort to remove toxic mercury containing preservatives from childhood vaccines.”
In 2007, then-Rep. Weldon introduced the Vaccine Safety and Public Confidence Assurance Act, which aimed to create an “Agency for Vaccine Safety Evaluation” within HHS. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is responsible for promoting both high immunization rates and vaccine safety, duties perceived by some to constitute a conflict of interest,” the legislation noted.
In 2005, during the legal battle over Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who was left in a persistent vegetative state after cardiac arrest, Weldon introduced the Incapacitated Persons Legal Protection Act to permit a federal court to review the issue.
NIH director
The director of the NIH sets agency policy and manages the programs and activities of the research center’s 27 institutes and centers, which include the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging, the National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Nominees for the research center’s director are subject to Senate confirmation.
Bhattacharya received his medical degree from the Stanford University School of Medicine and a doctorate from the university’s Department of Economics.
He emerged as a critic of strict lockdown policies during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, he co-authored the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which called for a focus on protecting the elderly and most vulnerable while ending lockdown measures such as school closures, saying they caused disproportionate damage to the overall population’s health and well-being. This stance was at odds with views held by public health officials – with then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins calling the open letter’s writers “fringe epidemiologists” – and Bhattacharya later said he was targeted for censorship by federal government officials.
In 2022, Bhattacharya and Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, were among a group of eight scientists and researchers who created “a blueprint containing key public health questions for a COVID-19 commission” on the nation’s pandemic response. The Norfolk Group’s document questioned such topics as “failures to protect older high-risk Americans,” “collateral lockdown harms,” “misleading risk communication” and “downplaying infection-acquired immunity.”
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Brian Stelter and Meg Tirrell contributed to this report.
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