Dr. Oz and the Contradictions of "Conservative" School Policy

A note about the scare quotes around “conservative” in the title: I don’t find anything “conservative” about using the federal government to override what most Americans consistently want from it: namely, adequately-funded public schools, protections for students from discrimination, and oversight of government funds.

When your central political hero’s most famous quote is, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help,” the implied definition of American conservatism is essentially the opposite of these moves (despite what Project 2025 seems to believe).

I also don’t want to get into the fortune-telling business by trying to predict which of the next presidential administration’s cabinet picks will get through, especially since confusion and chaos seem to be part of the deal, and the political careers of many of the current picks remind me of nothing so much as the medieval Wheel of Fortune.

But I do think if we’re going to try to read any political tea leaves, it’s best to start with what the administration’s picks suggest it prioritizes (if anything) in terms of specific policy areas.

Enter, Dr. Oz

Dr. Mehmet Oz is currently president-elect Trump’s proposed appointee to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency whose duties include overseeing children’s health insurance programs and the Affordable Care Act.

Fact-checking website Snopes just published a piece called, “Fact Check: Claim Dr. Oz Said Reopening Schools During Pandemic Would Be Worth 2%-3% More Kids Dying Isn't Wholly Accurate”.

On the one hand, Snopes offers a nuanced clarification that Oz was referring to the tradeoff of reopening schools in exchange for a potential increase in up to 3% total mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, it’s an important illustration about the way the American right has increasingly talked out of both sides of its mouth concerning school policy.

It’s also important to put Oz’s medical credibility in context. In a 2017 piece from the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics, the authors wrote,

To those “exercising power and influence over matters of policy, opinion, or taste” [5]—that is, the medical and political establishment—Dr. Oz is a dangerous rogue unfit for the office of America’s doctor. He has told mothers that there were dangerous levels of arsenic in their child’s apple juice (there weren’t) [6, 7] and suggested that green coffee is a “miracle” cure for obesity [8]. Federal regulators discovered altered data in hyped coffee bean evidence [8]. The Food and Drug Administration tested for arsenic in apple juice and found the “vast majority of apple juice tested to contain low levels of arsenic” and given these levels was “confident in the overall safety of apple juice consumed in this country” [7]. Dr. Oz also featured two guests on his show who claimed that genetically modified foods were cancer causing [9] (despite repeated safety reports that found no adverse effects [10]).

During the pandemic, Oz became an informal medical advisor to President Trump, and pushed discounted claims about the anti-COVID benefits of hydroxychloroquine, which were then amplified by Trump. (The drug was later linked to around 17,000 deaths.)

The Snopes article quotes Oz as saying in reference to his comments about mortality during the height of the pandemic,

As a heart surgeon, I spent my career fighting to save lives in the operating room by minimizing risks. At the same time, I'm being asked constantly, "How will we be able to get people back to their normal lives?" To do that, one of the important steps will be figuring out how do we get our children safely back to school. We know, for many kids, school is a place of security, nutrition and learning that is missing right now.

These were, of course, legitimate issues with which to wrestle during the highest-mortality era of the ongoing pandemic. But the Trump/ Project 2025/ national GOP playbook also relies on two major elements that essentially contradict the reasoning Oz uses: anti-school propaganda, and a plan to defund those very elements Oz (and other Republicans) consistently cited as reasons to reopen schools.

Image from Oz’s official website.

Anti-School Propaganda

The central (and largely unpopular) policy position of the 2024 national GOP has become a version of “parental rights” that has focused on allowing discrimination against transgender and nonbinary students, shifting public funds to private schools and educational services, and banning books.

These policy positions largely run counter to a message of keeping students safe and providing them with greater learning opportunities. Obviously, funding impacts whether or not schools are able to implement improvements to facilities and staffing which are associated with a safer environment for students. As one research paper on the topic from Cornell Legal Studies puts it, “In the real world of hard budgets and finite resources, school administrators will continue to be called upon to reconcile competing claims for limited financial resources… Moreover, to the extent fiscal constraints implicate school administrators’ investments in school safety and crime prevention and reduction programs, the stakes associated with such fiscal compromises necessarily increase”.

President-elect Trump’s own dangerous misinformation about schools performing gender reassignment surgeries on students is part of a broader rightwing trend of villainizing and encouraging discrimination against transgender Americans. Republican campaigns and groups spent over $200 million on ant-trans ads in 2024.

And transgender students constitute one of the most vulnerable demographic groups in public schools. According to a new report released last month by the Centers for Disease Control, “Transgender and questioning students had the highest prevalence of experiencing violence, poor mental health, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and unstable housing, and the lowest prevalence of school connectedness compared with cisgender students”.

Research has long shown that creating inclusive environments for these students improves their health outcomes; the Trump administration, national GOP, and “conservative” groups like Moms for Liberty and Heritage Foundation are moving hard in the other direction, pushing to prohibit transgender students (who constitute only about 3% of the total school population) from participating in sports, using restrooms that align with their gender identity, and even accessing federal nondiscrimination protections.