While the phrase “Make America Healthy Again” is mostly associated with Robert. F. Kennedy Jr., the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, it has been around for a while now. One person who has used that phrase is Dr. Nicole Saphier.
President Donald Trump has just announced that he is nominating her to serve as U.S. Surgeon General. He said this about the move:
I am pleased to announce that I am nominating Dr. Nicole B. Saphier to be the next SURGEON GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. Nicole is a STAR physician who has spent her career guiding women facing breast cancer through their diagnosis and treatment while tirelessly advocating to increase early cancer detection and prevention, while at the same time working with men and women on all other forms of cancer diagnoses and treatments.
Saphier is a Roman Catholic and is married to Paul Saphier, an endovascular neurosurgeon. She has also worked as a Fox News Channel contributor. The radiologist and medical journalist has authored several volumes. In her bestselling 2020 book Make America Healthy Again (Broadside Books), she argued that a combination of individual negligence and big government incompetence have seriously undermined America’s health care system.
In the first chapter of that book, she said this:
Our increased longevity is one of the greatest medical achievements of the modern era. On average, Americans today can expect to live nearly thirty years longer than did our predecessors living at the turn of the twentieth century.
Between 1880 and 1945, US life expectancy rose from 40 to 65 years thanks to greater understanding of hygiene, improvements in sanitation and clean water supply, and the discovery of most antibiotics and vaccines. Americans could see not only their children but their grandchildren grow up and enjoy their time in retirement.
What is interesting and disheartening, however, is that we seem to have hit a standstill. Today, after seventy years of innovation, heart disease and cancer are still the top two causes of death in the United States.
Even more alarming is the fact that, on some fronts, Americans’ health is growing worse. The United States has just witnessed a fall in life expectancy for the third year in a row—from a high of 78.9 years in 2014 to 78.6 years in 2017. The three-year drop represents the longest multiyear decline in life expectancy since the years 1915 to 1918, when the decrease was mostly attributable to World War I and the devastating 1918 influenza pandemic. As we approach a century of battling the same two top causes of death, why haven’t we made any progress on these? Or have we?
The significant decrease in communicable-disease death rates combined with the high birth rates that followed World War II resulted in the vast baby boom generation. The first baby boomers reached retirement age in 2011, and we are now witnessing the abundant health needs of a large, aging population. While improved detection and treatment of chronic diseases have resulted in an overall declining mortality trend, those improvements have also increased the percentage of treated disease in the population. That in turn has resulted in an overall increase in the number of people living with chronic illness and consequent health care expenditure.
Today, instead of vast numbers of immediate deaths from plague and war, a new and rather unsettling era of sickness is tormenting our nation: self-inflicted chronic diseases. Given our access to top-level medical care in this country, how is it possible that, even as Americans are living longer, they are living with more illness? The answer lies in us as individuals and in our society collectively.
As medical advancements continue to improve health, and more baby boomers enter their retirement years, the demand for medical services is growing. Thus, spending on health care is rising along with these trends by an order of magnitude.
Make America Healthy Again: How Bad Behavior and Big Government Caused a Trillion-Dollar Crisisby Saphier M.D., Nicole (Author)
Dr. Robert W. Malone has just penned a lengthy piece about her, a few portions of which are worth sharing here. He says this about her 2020 book:
It came out from HarperCollins’s Broadside Books imprint on April 21, 2020, and it was a national bestseller. The argument is that American healthcare spending has spiraled past seventeen percent of GDP because the system reimburses acute-care intervention rather than prevention, and because Americans themselves have allowed personal-responsibility habits — diet, alcohol, sedentary lifestyle — to drive the chronic-disease curve that the federal architecture is then asked to manage. Her data points include the figures the MAHA movement has been citing for two years: roughly eighty percent of cardiovascular disease and forty percent of all cancer cases preventable through lifestyle change; nearly one in five American deaths associated with poor diet; the federal government spending over a trillion dollars annually on healthcare. She makes those points five years before “Make America Healthy Again” was the political brand of an HHS Secretary.
He speaks about how the Senate confirmation process might lay out, and gives this assessment of where she is at in terms of key issues:
Here is the thing that matters for MAHA. The vocabulary was already in the conservative-health-policy bloodstream before Kennedy took it up. There was a 2020 conservative-health-policy book using exactly that title, with exactly that diagnostic premise, and it was a bestseller. The MAHA movement did not invent the framing; it organized a much broader political coalition around a framing that was already partly there. Saphier was one of the people writing in that register before the political brand consolidated. That is a fact worth sitting with….
Read as a totality, the position is what I would call moderate-MAHA. She is pro-individual-vaccine on the merits. She is supportive of parental autonomy on schedule. She is critical of universal pediatric mandates absent benefit data. She is explicitly sympathetic to MAHA’s vaccine-safety-surveillance reform agenda. She is not, in any reading I can construct from the documentary record, an anti-vaccine voice in the medical-freedom register that, say, Children’s Health Defense operates in. She is also not, in any reading I can construct, a CDC-establishment-defending voice of the kind Cassidy is looking for.
He continues:
The hard question, on the MAHA side, is whether the chronic-disease-and-prevention framework Saphier brings — distinct from Kennedy’s environmental and pharmaceutical-capture framing in its specific causal emphases — counts as a continuation of the agenda or as a narrowing of it. The honest answer is that it is some of both. The food-and-chronic-disease half of MAHA is fully consistent with the framework Saphier was already articulating in 2020. The vaccine-policy half, the medical-freedom register, and the environmental-toxin and pharmaceutical-capture critiques are not her register. She will not, as Surgeon General, be the voice for those parts of the agenda. That work runs elsewhere in the department, and it has run elsewhere in the department for the entire fifteen months of this administration.
He concludes his piece this way:
She is not the MAHA Warrior the administration nominated when it nominated Means. She is also not the establishment-physician sellout the harder register would have to make her in order to dismiss the nomination. She is a credentialed cancer specialist who wrote the MAHA case under the MAHA title five years before MAHA was a political brand, who has a mixed but defensible vaccine record, who is sympathetic to the parts of the MAHA agenda that have the broadest public support, and who is going to be the third Surgeon General nominee the administration tries to push through a Republican Senate that has already refused two.
That is the actual situation. The right MAHA response is to look at it clearly, support what is supportable, ask the right questions at the hearing, and reserve judgment until the record on the floor is fuller than the record we have today.
The chronic-disease epidemic in American children is not going to be solved by any Surgeon General. It is going to be solved by the broader political and cultural realignment that the MAHA movement is one part of. Saphier, on the documentary record, is part of that realignment. Whether she is the right person for this particular seat at this particular moment is the question her confirmation hearing is about to test. https://www.malone.news/p/who-is-nicole-saphier?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Time will tell whether she is accepted for the position. But a Kennedy/Saphier team could be an interesting one indeed, and the usual leftist voices will undoubtedly be making another loud stink about all this.
