If Dr. Mehmet Oz is confirmed to lead the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, he said in an ethics letter dated Feb. 16 that he will sell health care stock and leave his role as an advisor to iHerb, LLC, a nutritional supplement company that he has promoted on social media.
Although Oz is a heart surgeon, he rose to fame in appearances on the Oprah Winfrey Show in the early 2000s and eventually got his own daytime TV program, the Dr. Oz Show. He's been criticized in recent years for promoting dubious health and wellness products.
The ethics filings show the broad sweep of Oz's interests in health and wellness companies, and his plans to avoid potential conflicts of interest as he oversees the agency responsible for more than $1.5 trillion in annual federal outlays.
Oz owns between $5 million and $25 million in iHerb vested restricted stock units, according to his financial disclosure filed with the Office of Government Ethics. His ethics agreement says he will divest those holdings within 90 days after confirmation, and that he "will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that to my knowledge has a direct and predictable effect on the financial interests of this entity until I have divested it, unless I first obtain a written waiver."
However, the financial disclosure leaves open the possibility that Oz could hold onto some of his iHerb holdings until the company goes public or is bought, according to Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer under former President George W. Bush.
The iHerb language is "ambiguous," Painter said. "He will need to make it very clear that he's going to be completely out of that company."
Representatives for Oz did not respond to requests for comment.
Oz would oversee Medicare and Medicaid
Oz's confirmation hearing in the Senate hasn't been scheduled. If confirmed, he would oversee Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces for individual insurance, together representing health coverage for 160 million Americans. He would report to the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was sworn in Feb. 13.
In the ethics letter, Oz also said he would divest his stock in dozens of other companies, including drugmakers Abbvie and Eli Lilly, as well as health care distributor McKesson and health insurance company UnitedHealth Group.
However, he wrote that he will retain his position with his production company, Zoco Productions, LLC, but he "will not at any time receive compensation" for services performed during his time as CMS administrator.
As a result, he can go on Fox News and talk about Medicare and Medicaid, but he can't go on anything made by Zoco Productions and do the same, said ethics lawyer Painter.
"You can't be a media star making money on media and running Medicare and Medicaid at same time," he added.
Oz also said in the letter that he will resign from Oz Media LLC, and iHerb Oz Partners LLC, but "will continue to have a financial interest in these entities," without providing "services material to the production of income."
Nominee for NIH made nearly $12,000 on social media platform X
Ethics disclosures for another nominee for a key health position were also posted.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health researcher waiting to be confirmed as the next director of the National Institutes of Health, said in an ethics letter that he will retire from his professorship at Stanford upon confirmation and divest some investments within 90 days. The letter says he has stepped down from roles with four organizations.
The resignations include the Collateral Global Charity, a group Bhattacharya helped found in the United Kingdom in the wake of the pandemic to criticize how the government responded to COVID-19. Bhattacharya became a vocal critic of the U.S. government response, including the NIH, after he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration.
The declaration called for relaxing measures like lockdowns to control the spread of the virus to build up immunity in the population as quickly as possible while protecting the most vulnerable, like the elderly. The declaration was dismissed as dangerous by many infectious disease experts.
Bhattacharya is also resigning from Biosafety Now, a group that advocates for restricting "gain-of-function" research, which can involve making pathogens more dangerous so scientists can study them. The Trump administration may impose new restrictions on this research.
Biosafety Now is also a proponent of the theory that COVID resulted from research conducted in China, not spillover from animals to humans. Proponents of this theory have criticized the NIH for allegedly playing a role in that research—a charge strongly denied by NIH officials.
Bhattacharya disclosed that he made $11,995 last year as part of a program at Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, that enables premium accounts to receive payments based on engagement from other premium users, according to the financial disclosure form. But he has "ceased creating content for compensation and have ceased sharing in revenue for content creation," according to his ethics letter.
In addition Bhattacharya said he will divest investments in Walmart Inc., Nvidia Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Mfg. Co. Ltd., as well as the Fidelity Select Biotechnology Portfolio and Fidelity Select Health Care Portfolio.
"With regard to each of these entities, I will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that to my knowledge has a direct and predictable effect on the financial interests of the entity until I have divested it, unless I first obtain a written waiver," he wrote.
Have information you want to share about the ongoing changes at federal health agencies? Reach out to these authors via encrypted communications: Sydney Lupkin @sydneylupkin.36 and Rob Stein @robstein.22.
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