Public Health System Integrity Destroyed: The Aftermath Of The Covid Vaccine Mandate | Dr. Nicole Saphier | EP 286

REBECCA WEBER:

 Hello everyone, I’m Rebecca Weber and you’re watching AMAC’s podcast, Better for America. Joining me today is Dr. Nicole Saphier. Dr. Saphier is an American medical journalist, a radiologist, and director of breast imaging at Memorial Sloan Kettering. And many of you know her as a medical contributor on Fox News. She is also a national best-selling author and a mother to three beautiful sons. We have a great conversation about faith, motherhood, and more coming up in just a moment. So don’t go anywhere.

REBECCA:

Dr. Nicole Saphier, thank you so much for joining me here today on Better for America. It’s a real pleasure to have you with me.

NICOLE SAPHIER

Rebecca, I’m so happy to be on with you today.

REBECCA:

Well thank you and you’ve recently published a national best-selling book, Love Mom, Inspiring Stories Celebrating Motherhood. And it’s such a beautiful book with great stories meant to touch the hearts of moms. Can you tell us what inspired you to write this book and a little bit of background about maybe your early journey through motherhood?

SAPHIER:

Well Love Mom is certainly a passion project of mine. While I’ve had other books in the past, they focus more on health and wellness and health care policy. Love Mom is completely different. It’s a compilation of beautiful stories of motherhood, starting out with my own, which for those that don’t know about me, my motherhood journey was quite non-traditional. It began when I was still in high school. I was 17 years old and I became pregnant. And after some soul-searching and a lot of reflection, I made the decision to have my son. I was that pregnant teenager walking the halls of high school and he was born about six weeks before my high school graduation. So my son was at my high school graduation, my college graduation, my medical school graduation, and he’s been with me essentially my entire adult life. And I am proud to say that he has now graduated college himself and just finished flight school training to be a commercial pilot. And somewhere along the way, I got married and had two more boys. So I’m a mom of three boys. And so it was it was quite an experience for me to be able to talk about my story, kind of getting down to some of the nitty-gritty of it. It certainly wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns and I really talk about, you know, some of the struggles that I had during my time. But I was able to also in the book share the story of so many other moms, many of them familiar faces from Fox News like Ainsley Earhart, Martha McCallum, Carly Schimpkis, Janis Dean, Jennifer Griffin, and so many other others. But also it’s not just Fox Moms. There are many non-Fox Moms. Some were Gold Star Moms that I knew. Some were Patience of Mine and others. And I can tell you that these stories, they’re so different. But we all had some of the same themes that we had to lean on our faith, our family, and our friends to kind of get us through and that there is nothing more precious than being a mother.

REBECCA:

I just love this. I love hearing it as a mother myself and recently grandmother and I’m expecting another grandbaby on the way. It is so true. The rewards and the blessings of motherhood and grand parenthood are ones that ought to be celebrated and shared more often. So I’m thrilled to share and talk more about this book. Now you were just a teenager when you gave birth to your first son and you did describe this in the book as being transformative. Can you take us through what going through that life change at such a young age was like? That must have been tough and but I think it’s important for people to hear it because you have a beautiful story.

SAPHIER:

 Yeah, you know, I mean how much time do we have? That’s right. I really had to put it down in the chapter because there were a lot of emotions and when I was writing my chapter, writing this book, I kind of went through them all again. A lot of things that I suppressed, you know, we kind of tend to do that when you have emotional trauma or physical trauma. You try and suppress those memories and you know thinking about it again, it really was difficult. There were a lot of feelings of loneliness. I was frightened. I felt isolated while my parents stood by my side. Kind of the rest of the world kind of let me go. My friends who I thought were my friends at the time certainly were not. I also had members of the church who kind of preferred that I didn’t attend teen mass anymore. So these were all my community at the time and so to be shunned from those communities was heartbreaking for me. But I can tell you that, you know, it was overcoming some of that heartbreak and those feelings that really helped me refocus my priorities and there’s nothing greater, nothing more important in our lives than our family around us. And so that was that was really interesting and important for me to realize because as a teenager we are all consumed with the world around us, what people think of us and our priorities aren’t in the right spot. So I was kind of forced into realizing, “Hey, you know what? None of this matters. It’s all noise around me.” So while I did cry many nights, I did keep my teen Bible by the side of the bed and I had it highlighted I had it page marked just for quick reference and I found a lot of strength and just comfort in my teen Bible knowing that there’s nothing being put in front of me that I won’t be able to overcome. And you know that old adage “everything happens for a reason.” Well I don’t necessarily believe in that but I do believe things work out the way that they are meant to.

REBECCA:

 That’s beautiful. You know I agree with you there that as a Christian myself I think faith is so important in all things that we do and certainly here it has really helped strengthen you as you and your faith was strengthened. So your faith helped you through a difficult time and then of course when you when you could realize all of those great blessings you know it pays dividends that we don’t talk enough about. So I think that’s just terrific. Leaning into the word is really great advice. There is an obvious attack on the nuclear family. I mean this AMAC members agree that today’s societal society is very different and it seems that the pro-abortion crowd really wants to promote, celebrate, even encourage abortion rather than view it as a last resort. How are women pressured by society in your view and what advice might you want to share with our great listeners about how they might be able to play a strong supportive role in the life of a young pregnant woman who is faced with the decision to choose life?

SAPHIER:

 You know it’s really interesting how the pro-woman or the feminist movement has evolved over decades. The fact that I am a physician in an academic institution with leadership positions I mean this was all a result because of the women who came before me and you know fighting for our right to work, our right to have an equal standing professionally if we so choose. But it seems these days the modern-day woman it’s not necessarily fighting for equality. They’re actually kind of seems like trying to erase what it is to be a woman and they’re no longer celebrating you know the fact that women you know we’re literally made to be mothers and to have that nurturing I mean that’s that’s who we are to have that nurturing personality and while there are so many support systems for women who don’t want to choose life the amount of financial and just support in general for abortion clinics is just astronomical. There’s not nearly as much support it feels like or attention on the woman who doesn’t want to choose an abortion who wants to choose life and so I think that what we have to do as communities is really rally around the people know that if you do have an unexpected pregnancy and unplanned pregnancy maybe you’re not in the most secure position yourself. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be forced into a decision to get rid of the child it just means that you have to lean on those around you whether it’s your family whether it’s your friends whether it’s external resources you know I wish that people could help lift up these women who truly want to choose life and celebrate the fact that there is no greater gift than being a mother.

REBECCA:

Well Dr. Nicole you certainly are doing that through this book so I encourage everyone to certainly get your hands on it. Love mom inspiring stories celebrating motherhood what an incredible read thank you so much and speaking of society you know we do see so many other cultural changes really sweeping across America and today it’s this woke ideology and it’s infiltrated our medical schools and medical guidelines. Now AMAC supports the educate act this is really standing up against these DEI diversity equity and inclusion policies in medical schools and that bill seeks to eliminate this divisive race-based diversity equity and inclusion programming and the practices in our nation’s medical schools. I think it’s so unfortunate that medical schools today have advanced the narrative that health care is systematic or systemically racist and they’re calling for medical reparations. In your view does this ideology compromise the quality of medical professionals that we produce and if so how?

SAPHIER:

 Yeah that’s a great question something that I deal with on a daily basis and one of the things that it’s important to acknowledge there is bias there is implicit bias in the health care industry undoubtedly it’s well documented physicians to treat patients who are morbidly obese and of certain ethnicities differently there’s also based on based on race you can have different responses to medications you can have more aggressive diseases so we do have to acknowledge race and some other comorbidities like being overweight when it comes to treating patients. Now the whole DEI program has gone way too far and it is taken as far away from what our actual role is to do no harm and to treat our patients to the best that we can. I think I read recently about some curriculum at UCLA where they were having someone come in and telling the students that they need to create a mother earth these pro-palestinian protesters and all of this really distracts from what we’re there to learn we’re there to learn about the human body the ways to diagnose the ways to treat and the ways to prevent illness bringing in all of this political noise certainly takes us farther away from what it is we are supposed to be doing and while our health care industry is already in a moment of chaos the last thing we need are these young physicians coming out who don’t actually have a grasp on the knowledge of what they should do because they’ve spent more time and resources on these DEI activities I don’t think they have a place when it comes to medical school.

REBECCA:

 Yeah and that’s why we’re fighting on the issue the educate act directly addresses all of those concerns and it does require really a return to academic excellence and patient care that’s free from any form of politically motivated discrimination so good to hear your views there as well I do want to pivot and talk briefly about the vaccine you have this is the COVID vaccine you have spoken about the COVID vaccine at great length and you defended its efficacy while maintaining that inoculation should be up to the patient and their Now you certainly were not alone in this and many alleged experts during that time really did say the same thing but recently the 10th circuit found that the vaccine mandate was unconstitutional so looking back do you now believe that more should have been done to defend those people who were against the vaccine and then how do you think this is really impacted Americans as it relates to their attitudes towards government intervention because people are concerned of another pandemic and and how the American people might react.

SAPHIER:

 Well there will always be another pandemic when it will be I don’t know hopefully it’s not in our lifetime but there certainly will be and unfortunately the way that this last pandemic was handled has caused massive distrust of the public health system and rightfully so they really botched a lot of things when it came to it and their intrusion on individual choice they obliterated it it didn’t feel like a democratic society during that time and when the initial vaccines did roll out and they were presenting efficacy data that looked very good the best we could do was go off on that but the reality was we didn’t have long-term studies on it which is the gold standard and anything we do in health care so therefore of course the recommendation is anybody who wants to go out and get it by all means go get it but I can’t tell someone that they have to go do this even if I had decades of data saying it was safe I still don’t do that my job as a physician is to say here’s the data here’s what we know the rest is up to you what do you want to do and that was completely obliterated during the pandemic we lost that and as soon as they continue to push for children the lowest risk to get the vaccines and then the booster after booster after booster when we already started to see decreasing efficacy of these vaccines and a rise in some of the side effects that’s where they lost all trust for me specifically and certainly public health as well do I think that we need to continue to look into the errors of what was caused do I think that there will also will be ramifications for those that really push this I don’t think so but I do think that we need to take a hard look at what happened during the pandemic we still haven’t heard I’m sorry yeah we’ve seen the courts rule that things were unconstitutional but no one actually said I’m sorry I haven’t heard President Biden come out and say I’m sorry when the mayor of then mayor of New York City come out and say I’m sorry that I wouldn’t allow children in restaurants unless they were vaccinated despite the fact that there is more of a risk to the vaccine at this point than actually COVID no one has actually apologized to the American people and I think they deserve.

REBECCA:

Well thank you so much dr. Nicole sapphire thank you so much for joining me today everyone needs to get their hands on your inspiring book love mom this is great inspiring stories celebrating motherhood thank you again for joining with me and God bless you.

SAPHIER:

Thanks so much for having me.