Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he’s nominating Dr. Mehmet Oz to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. For those keeping track, that brings us up to three TV personalities in Trump’s Cabinet.
“Dr. Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake,” Trump said in a statement. Both Oz and Kennedy have a history of sharing dubious medical information, so having them helm CMS and Health and Human Services respectively seems like it will be nothing short of a disaster.
Despite the fact that he was at one point a well-regarded heart surgeon, Dr. Oz now prefers to extoll patently untrue information. As a frequent guest on Fox News in 2020, Dr. Oz routinely promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for treating COVID. He also told Sean Hannity in April 2020 that schools should be re-opened because it would “only cost us 2-3% in terms of total mortality.” During more than a decade of hosting The Dr. Oz Show, he frequently promoted bunk medical claims, so much so that there’s an entire Wikipedia page about it. In 2014, he was reamed out by a Senate committee for promoting diet scams on the show.
More recently, while he was campaigning for Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022, Oz said that abortion at any stage of pregnancy was “still murder” because he believes life begins at conception.
“America is facing a Healthcare Crisis, and there may be no physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again,” Trump said. Fingers crossed colloidal silver works for measles.
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