President Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general is taking fire from all sides.
Days after it was revealed that Janette Nesheiwat earned her M.D. from the American University of the Caribbean—and not the University of Arkansas, as she had long claimed—MAGA conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer has called for Trump to pick a new, anti-vaxxer nominee.
Nesheiwat, who served as the medical director of a for-profit chain of urgent-care centers in New York, joined Fox News as a medical contributor during the COVID-19 pandemic and has given on-air interviews for other networks.
“I know @realDonald Trump likes people who go on TV for some weird reason I will never understand (I love him), but we can’t have a pro-COVID vaccine nepo appointee who is currently embroiled in a medical malpractice case and who didn’t go to medical school in the US as the US Surgeon General.” Loomer wrote in a post on X. “She is now being accused of lying about her credentials.”
The post came just days after the 31-year-old 9/11 truther celebrated the ouster of Nesheiwat’s brother-in-law, Trump’s former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and took credit for the firing. The president has also fired Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh, who was head of U.S. Cyber Command, after Loomer launched a loyalty purge last month.
During her TV interviews, Nesheiwat was often introduced as a double board-certified physician in family and emergency medicine. She has often said her father’s tragic death from a freak shooting accident when she was 13 inspired her to go into medicine.
But according to Anthony Clark, the independent journalist who broke the story about her medical degree and credentials, she was only board certified in family medicine, not emergency medicine. Nesheiwat herself has described urgent care as different from emergency medicine in that urgent-care doctors only treat non-threatening medical problems.
After her nomination for surgeon general, she quietly removed her specialization in “ER medicine” from her website, Clark reported, and sometime after CBS reported on her medical degree on April 29, she changed her LinkedIn profile to reflect her real alma mater.
But it’s the part of her biography that’s true—the fact that she worked on the front lines treating thousands of patients in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic—that Loomer really takes issue with.
During the pandemic, Nesheiwat described vaccine hesitancy as a “global health threat” and encouraged viewers to get vaccinated.
“She used her access to Fox News to promote the dangerous Covid vaccine, which is now killing millions of people,” Loomer wrote.
A 2022 study of the side effects of the 8 billion COVID-19 jabs administered worldwide found that just 55 people had died after being vaccinated. Of those deaths, 38 were found to have possibly been related to vaccine side effects, and even then, more research was needed to determine whether there was a causal relationship, according to the National Library of Medicine.
Loomer then repeated the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism and accused Nesheiwat of “not being ideologically aligned with Donald Trump or his admin’s health initiatives.”
She wrote: “By her own logic, President Donald Trump and [Health and Human Services Secretary] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are GLOBAL HEALTH THREATS because they are challenging the safety of childhood vaccines,” which yes, fair point.
Since taking the helm at HHS, Kennedy—a longtime crusader against vaccines—has appointed a vaccine skeptic to investigate the debunked link between vaccination and autism, forced out the nation’s top vaccine regulator, and promoted unhinged conspiracy theories about the MMR vaccine containing “fetus debris.”
“I genuinely wish we had a different nominee that was more aligned with personal liberties,” Loomer wrote.
The post Laura Loomer Sets to Work on New MAGA Civil War on Trump Pick appeared first on The Daily Beast.
