For most Americans who don’t watch Fox News, Donald Trump’s pick for Surgeon General was probably an unknown. Dr. Janette Nesheiwat has been a contributor on the cable news giant since the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, but with a background in private practice instead of academia,
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In the wake of Neshiewat’s nomination, however, the liberal media has done a deep dive on her background, and the New York Times struck paydirt over the weekend with the revelation that when she was 13, she was involved in a “freak accident” that took the life of her father.
Neshiewat was reaching for a tackle box above her parents bed when the box was knocked off the shelf and came crashing down with a loud bang. A gun stored next to, or perhaps inside the box, fell with the tackle box and discharged, striking her father in the head.
Her father’s death played an instrumental role in her decision to become a doctor, according to Neishiewat herself, but the Times says she’s never detailed the unintentional shooting in her comments over the years.
As she has emerged as a public figure, Dr. Nesheiwat has periodically referenced her father’s death — and the strength her mother displayed raising her and four siblings. To her 80,000 followers on X, she reflected on how her mother would take them to the ocean to cheer them up after “dad passed away in an accident.”
His death is mentioned in the very first sentence of her memoir, “Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine,” which will be released this month: “When I was 13 years old, I helplessly watched my dear father dying from an accident as blood was spurting everywhere,” she writes. “I couldn’t save his life.”
From this moment, she writes, she yearned to help others. “This was the start of my personal journey in life to become a physician and enter the world of healing arts,” she writes.
Nowhere in the next 260 pages does she elaborate on how her father died, and she does not mention that he was shot.
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Neshiewat may have wanted to keep those painful details private, but now that the Times has run its expose it is certain to come up during her Senate confirmation hearings. After all, Biden’s surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy has declared gun violence a public health “crisis”, and I’m sure that senators on both sides of the aisle will want to hear how her family’s tragedy has impacted and influenced her views on gun ownership, gun control, and the role of doctors in the gun control debate.
It’s important to note that Neshiewat has never tried to use her father’s death to push for gun control, at least publicly, and she’s had plenty of opportunity to do so as a Fox News medical contributor.
Still, it’s fair to ask her thoughts on Murthy’s use of the surgeon general’s office to encourage gun control measures like child access prevention laws, universal background checks, “red flag” laws, bans on semi-automatic firearms and “large capacity” magazines, and expanding “gun-free zones”; all of which were recommendations in his “firearm violence advisory” issued earlier this year, along with slightly more anodyne proposals like pushing for doctors to talk about gun storage with patients during “routine and preventive medical visits” and his desire to expend federal funds on “gun violence” research.
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Given Murthy’s focus on guns and gun owners, whoever Trump nominated as Surgeon General would likely be questioned about their own views on treating firearms as a public health issue. But with Neshiewat’s own painful history, the topic is going to be irresistible to anti-gunners in the Senate, and I’m sure that Second Amendment supporters would like some reassurances that the good doctor won’t parrot Murthy’s gun control talking points if she’s confirmed.
