Trump Picks Oz for CMS Administrator

In another pick that shows a preference for unconventional, telegenic personalities over experience, President-elect Donald Trump has picked Mehmet Oz, M.D., to be CMS administrator.

Oz, 64, a professor emeritus of cardiothoracic surgery at Columbia University, hosted the popular "The Dr.Oz Show" from 2009 to 2022.

He was Trump's pick to run for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022, a race he ended up losing to Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat.

Trump's other picks for top jobs in his administration with television backgrounds include Pete Hegseth, his nominee for defense secretary, and Sean Duffy, his pick for transportation secretary. Trump's own fame soared to household-name status as the host of "The Apprentice."

The announcement of the selection of Oz comes five days after Trump announced he was nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a sprawling department that includes the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as CMS. No other department affects the day-to-day lives of Americans as much as HHS. Kennedy, although not a TV star, is a famous as member of the Kennedy family. He is the son of the Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general, New York senator and liberal icon, and the nephew of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president.

During his campaign, Trump said he would let Kennedy "go wild" on healthcare, food and medicine, and the picking Oz for the top job at CMS is, at first blush, consistent with giving Kennedy wide authority over federal healthcare policy. Kennedy is highly critical of what he sees as the corrupt influence pharmaceutical and food companies have over the FDA and the CDC. Although he says he is not anti-vaccine, Kennedy questions the safety of vaccines and says they haven't been tested in clinic trials. Public health officials and experts push back hard on his assertions, which they say are false and likely to lead to lower vaccine rates and possible upticks in diseases such as measles.

Although the shock factor of Trump's picks for the upper echelon of his administration is wearing off as the unexpected becomes expected, Oz is surprising for CMS' top job. CMS administrators, who are in charge of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, have tended to focused on dry, technical issues concerning the cost and price of medical services for beneficiaries, endless fights over payment rates and demonstration projects of various kinds. As an entertaining and energetic television doctor, Oz focused on splashy personal health topics such as supplements and weight loss.

Oz is not identified as being antivaccine like Kennedy or the milder characterization of him as a vaccine skeptic. Oz did speak about “spacing out” childhood vaccines on his TV show, and Kennedy was among his guests. On the other hand, Oz ardently defended the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines early in the pandemic. In a "myth vs. facts" segment on an Orlando television station about the COVID-19 vaccines in 2021, Oz talked emphatically about the safety of Pfizer and Moderna's mRNA vaccines and knocked down notions that they could cause cancer and infertility and infiltrate a person's genome. "They don't even get close to your DNA," Oz said of the vaccines.

Weight loss was the go-to topic on Oz's TV show, and he talked up products such as green coffee extract. A study published in BMJ looked at the recommendations Oz made during 40 episodes in 2013. Christina Korownyk, an associate professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, and her colleagues found that 46% of his recommendations were supported by evidence, 15% were contradicted by it, and that evidence couldn't be found for 39% of them. Oz was the focus of a 2014 Senate hearing on diet pill scams, and he expressed regret at not recommending particular companies, which let others use his name to spread exaggerated claims.

"You know what the biggest disservice I have done for my audience? It is not the flowery language Sen. McCaskill is criticizing me for. It is that I never told them where to go to buy the product," Oz said at the hearing.

In an interview last week with Fox television host Sean Hannity, Oz praised Kennedy, spoke about the "illness industrial complex"and laid blame on unspecified experts.

"This is the irony of the whole situation. The current healthcare system in this country is unsustainable, and the experts who brought us these problems are the ones who are complaining about the appointment of RFK Jr.," Oz told Hannity.

Oz said he expected people working at HHS to welcome Kennedy's leadership because they are "smothered under corporate capture."

"These agencies aren't free to do what they want to do frequently, and RFK is not going to tolerate that," Oz said.

He finished the interview with direct address to the viewers that evidenced his experience with television.

"Much of what you are suffering from — the weight you have gained, the metabolic syndrome, the diabetes and the heart disease I operated on as surgeon — much of the toxic material coursing through your blood vessels is not your fault, especially your kids because they are canaries in the coal mine."

This is a developing story.