As President-elect Donald Trump begins assembling his cabinet and administration, several physicians are among the candidates for leadership positions.
Most notable, Mr. Trump has tapped television star Mehmet Oz, MD, as his nominee for administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Here are four additional physicians joining Mr. Trump's second administration:
Marty Makary, MD, a pancreatic surgeon at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has been named commissioner of the FDA. Dr. Makary is the chief of islet transplant surgery at Johns Hopkins, served in leadership at the World Health Organization Patient Safety Program and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He's also served as a public adviser to Paragon Health Institute, a conservative healthcare think tank, and regularly appears on Fox News. He previously made controversial claims about COVID-19. The position requires Senate confirmation.
Dave Weldon, MD, a former congressman from Florida and a physician, has been chosen to lead the CDC. Dr. Weldon is an anti-vaccine ally. He served 14 years in Congress, representing the 15th District of Florida, where he was a critic of the public health agency and its vaccine program. In 2007, he introduced a bill to transfer responsibility for the nation's vaccine safety from the CDC to an independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services.
Janette Nesheiwat, MD, has been chosen for U.S. Surgeon General. She is an emergency and family health doctor in Florida and a Fox News medical contributor. She has led disaster relief missions around the world, including Haiti, Ukraine and Morocco. She is currently the medical director at CityMD, a network of urgent care centers in New York and New Jersey, and sells a line of supplements.
Jay Bhattacharya, MD, a Stanford physician and economist has been selected to direct the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bhattacharya was vocally "anti-lockdown" during the COVID-19 pandemic, stirring up public controversy. Dr. Bhattacharya is one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a paper issued in 2020 that argued that the virus should be allowed to spread among young healthy people who were "at minimal risk of death” and could develop natural immunity.