Trump’s third surgeon general pick faces Wednesday confirmation hearing
Dr. Nicole Saphier, a radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New Jersey and former Fox News contributor, faces a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday as President Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general. She filed her financial disclosure and ethics agreement last week.
The filings show Saphier received $270,605 in business income from Empower MD, LLC, which she valued in a range of $100,001 to $250,000. Saphier said she would sell the company before assuming the duties of surgeon general.
Empower MD owns the supplement line Drop RX, which has sold at least nine formulations since at least 2024, according to The Guardian’s previous reporting. Saphier promoted the products on her Instagram account, and the company sold several 2-ounce liquid formulations on Amazon packaged in glass bottles with a dropper. Most formulations were no longer available as of Monday, though one blend marketed as “Soothe” — containing turmeric and ginger root — was being sold for $24.99.
One of the Drop RX products includes kava kava root, which the U.S. military lists as a prohibited dietary supplement. The FDA in 2020 published a 29-page review of the scientific literature highlighting safety concerns about liver damage associated with kava use.
Saphier and her husband hold investments in tobacco companies, with both reporting stakes in Philip Morris International. Her husband separately owns shares of British American Tobacco Industries. In her ethics agreement, Saphier wrote that she would divest her interests in both companies within 90 days of her confirmation.
The filings also reported investments in pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, technology firms, fossil fuel companies, and food companies including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and McDonald’s.
Public health advocates raised concerns about both the supplement business and the tobacco holdings. Dr. Peter Lurie, of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, questioned the rationale for supplement-industry involvement: “The question is what kind of person invests in supplements or runs a supplement company in the first place,” Lurie said, noting that such products are generally not supported by rigorous scientific research. Lurie has been an outspoken critic of the wellness industry and has called sellers of such supplements “grifters” within Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement.
Lurie said the tobacco investments were more troubling still. He said it was “unimaginable that someone could be surgeon general who had tied their own financial interests to increased sales of a product that the surgeon general’s office itself had declared deadly.” “No public health person worth their salt would put a penny in a tobacco company,” he said. “It ought to be an automatic exclusion from a position of such responsibility.”
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Spokesman Kush Desai previously said that Saphier “is an accomplished physician who has practiced radiology at Memorial-Sloan-Kettering and has been an outspoken voice on breast cancer prevention, intrusive Covid-19 mandates, the politicization of science, and the federal government’s role in America’s chronic disease epidemic.” He said she would be a “powerful asset for President Trump and work tirelessly to deliver on every facet of his Maha agenda.”
Empower MD did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Saphier is Trump’s third pick for the job after his first two failed to advance in the Senate.