The Trump administration will pull the nomination of Dr. Janette Nesheiwat to be surgeon general following reports that she inflated her credentials, Bloomberg reported.
Nesheiwat has described herself as a double board-certified physician with a degree from the University of Arkansas School of Medicine. But Nesheiwat actually earned her medical degree from the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine, in St. Maarten.
Nesheiwat has also been criticized by conservatives for touting the idea that children can identity as a gender that differs from their biological sex.
“But the most important thing of all of this is no matter what gender your child identifies as, accept them and love them for who they are,” she said on Fox News in 2022.
Nesheiwat’s nomination hearing was scheduled for May 8 before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
Nesheiwat’s sister Julia is married to Mike Waltz, who was recently moved from national security advisor to the nominee for United Nations ambassador.
Nesheiwat’s positions on vaccines differ from that of the Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Nesheiwat has previously described the COVID vaccine as a “gift from God.”
“I’m optimistic we are on our way to ending the needless loss of lives starting with the nothing short of miraculous coronavirus vaccine and the development of therapeutics,” she wrote in an opinion piece published in Fox News in 2021.
“We have many vaccines in existence that treat a variety of non-life-threatening diseases,” she continued, “but to have a COVID vaccine, i.e. a Pfizer or Moderna mRNA that will actually save you from dying is a gift from God.”
Kennedy has called the same immunization the “deadliest ever made.”