Saphier completed a fellowship in cancer-related imaging from the Mayo Clinic and serves as a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Breast Cancer in Young Women. She is currently the Director of Breast Imaging at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New Jersey.

Trump said in his Truth Social announcement that Saphier is “an INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR, who makes complicated health issues more easily understood by all Americans.” 

Trump slammed Cassidy, who faces a tough primary election, as being “a very disloyal person” in a series of Truth Social Posts on Thursday afternoon announcing the change. The president added that Cassidy “stood in the way of” Means, who was favored by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Means, the sister of senior White House health policy adviser Calley Means, was initially nominated for surgeon general last year. Her confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which Cassidy chairs, took place several months ago.

Kennedy condemned Cassidy, saying he “once again did the dirty work for the entrenched interests seeking to stall the MAHA movement and protect the very status quo that has made America the sickest nation on earth.” 

Kennedy and Cassidy, a physician, have clashed multiple times on both vaccine policy and abortion-related issues. 

But Cassidy is not the only senator to have reservations about Means. During Means’s confirmation hearing, Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) seemed skeptical of her answers to questions on vaccines, particularly regarding the newborn Hepatitis B vaccine, and birth control access.

Republican advocacy groups and former health officials from the first Trump administration also questioned Casey Means’s qualifications for the role and her personal medical philosophy. Means earned her medical degree from Stanford University but quit her surgical residency program before completing it.

Several religious conservative organizations also have criticized Means’s embrace of she herself has called the “woo-woo” sides of the wellness movement, citing her newsletter posts in which she described talking to trees, taking psychedelic drugs, and participating in what critics call pagan rituals.

Means, who co-authored the metabolic health book Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health with her brother, was also criticized by Democrats for several financial conflicts of interest with wellness companies.

The president thanked Means for her service to the country and said she “will continue to fight for MAHA on the many important health issues facing our country.”

Saphier does not have a history of vaccine skepticism along the lines of others in the orbit of Kennedy. She has, though, been at odds with the public health establishment over vaccines in the past.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Saphier wrote a Wall Street Journal editorial with now-Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary on vaccinating children against the infection. 

They wrote that the disease risk for children was very low and that parents should be able to choose whether to vaccinate their young children.

Saphier also received backlash from the CDC in 2023 after falsely reporting on social media that the national agency was instituting a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for children. CDC officials at the time said the national agency could only make recommendations, and state and local jurisdictions established mandates.

Cassidy, one of the few remaining senators who voted to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021, protests, has clashed with the vaccine policy elements of the president’s MAHA agenda espoused by Kennedy.

Trump endorsed a Republican rival to Cassidy, Rep. Julia Letlow (R-LA), this spring, as did the Super PAC affiliated with the health and wellness movement, MAHA Action. 

The president blamed Cassidy’s “intransigence and political games” for delaying Casey’s confirmation hearing.

Calley Means also lambasted Cassidy on social media following Trump’s withdrawal of his sister’s nomination, saying he “worked to delay her and smear her.”

The senior adviser said Cassidy intentionally delayed the confirmation of Casey Means, who was pregnant at the time of her nomination, too close to her due date to throw off her nomination.

CDC HEAD JAY BHATTACHARYA HITS BACK AT CRITICS OVER WITHHELD COVID-19 VACCINE STUDY

“Bill Cassidy is a mindless avatar for his donors and a blind defender of the status quo system that is profiting from American sickness,” he wrote.

The Washington Examiner contacted Cassidy’s office for comment.