OPINION:
In my first semester of law school, I had the pleasure of meeting someone I came to admire for his intellect and drive to do good. While I was trying to balance work, night school and single life in Manhattan, he was already an accomplished physician at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. He had once applied to NASA’s astronaut program and was a resident at George Washington University Hospital in the emergency room the day President Ronald Reagan was shot.
He was brilliant and amiable. He asked my advice on advancing his organ donation nonprofit. When my nephew was born severely premature, he graciously met with his parents. I considered him a friend.
Fast forward two decades, and he’s sadly become a symbol of a politicized public health establishment that Americans no longer trust.
Today, Dr. Howard Zucker is the deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in charge of global health, quietly appointed by President Biden. Millions remember him, though, as showboating then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pandemic-era health commissioner.
The story of Dr. Zucker’s transition from respected physician to perceived political pawn isn’t unique. It is emblematic of the crisis being faced by the American medical profession.
Mr. Cuomo used COVID-19 as a national political platform, with his daily press conferences to stroke his ego and a multimillion-dollar book deal that framed him as a president-in-waiting.
While he was fashioning himself a pandemic hero, he turned Dr. Zucker into New York’s Anthony Fauci, a celebrity doctor appearing in television commercials and interviews.
Prolonged lockdowns, ridiculous social distancing and masking regulations cratered businesses and set school-age children back years. Some of the nation’s most restrictive vaccine and testing mandates that stripped people of their privacy, their jobs, religious freedom and rights of conscience were approved and enforced with an iron fist by Dr. Zucker’s department.
None, of course, would compare to the state’s nursing home policy that sent COVID-positive patients back into facilities where the resident population was at the highest risk for the virus. The policy claimed at least 10,000 lives, and the cover-up was a pure political salvage operation.
People died needlessly and mourned alone while the state’s spin machine worked overtime to protect the fiction that Mr. Cuomo was a hero. Dr. Zucker seemed a willing participant in all of it.
Before the pandemic, his department was trying to bury information about toxic drinking water in the upstate New York community of Hoosick Falls. As commissioner, he also allowed himself to be used by Mr. Cuomo to kill the state’s fracking industry.
We may never know how much political influence was brought to bear or how much the twin opiates of power and relevance made him acquiesce to now-infamous decisions. But as I watched his career from afar, I often hoped that he would finally extract himself from political servitude, putting science and his duty as a physician first again.
Seduced by political masters and activists, doctors like Dr. Zucker have lost the independence that at one time placed them among the most trusted people in the country.
Medical associations, hospitals, medical schools and the public health apparatus all appear to be increasingly co-opted by the politics and agenda of the far left.
Doctors of all political stripes have been pressured into making decisions that fly in the face of their training, particularly their oath to “do no harm.”
Nurses and doctors dancing on TikTok to get people to conform to dubious mandates. Doctors chiming in on climate change hysteria. Physicians intimidated into silence over barbaric trans surgeries.
Dr. Zucker allowed himself, as many doctors have done during the pandemic and since, to be used as tools of politicians who care more about photo ops and poll numbers than medicine.
The mixing of politics and science gives you “political science,” which is neither good science nor good politics.
The kind of leadership that the CDC needs now is someone who has demonstrated independence from politicians and left-wing activists in the medical community.
Public health agencies should be led by people who had the guts to say it was crazy to tell people they were safe while sitting in a restaurant but in danger of the virus while walking to their seats. They should be led by people who have demonstrated the highest caliber of ethics and transparency.
The next president must finally use the unfortunate examples of Drs. Zucker and Fauci to recommit this nation’s physician independence from political gamesmanship. The status quo will only exacerbate the crisis of confidence in public health and the medical profession that exists today.
• Tom Basile is the host of “America Right Now” on Newsmax and the author of “Tough Sell: Fighting the Media War in Iraq.” He served as an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from 2003 to 2004.
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