On Dec. 17, I had two back-to-back cancer surgeries. On Dec. 19, I had a third surgery. In the days I was in the hospital, I was confronted yet again by how broken our health-care system is and how tenuous it is for sick people in America.
Despite being on a surgical floor which necessitates — or is supposed to — more care, I often waited more than a half hour for a nurse or even an aide to respond to my call. One day, I received my morphine shot a full 90 minutes after it was requested and my Zofran shot — a medication used for cancer patients with violent nausea and vomiting, which I have — two hours late, resulting in my having massive dry heaves and adding to the pain of the surgeries.
The hospital — like most in Philadelphia — is understaffed, a legacy of the pandemic, and patients are suffering because of it.
In July, I went septic from cancer and was in the hospital for two weeks, nine days of which were in ICU, fighting for my life. It was a grim time and I was lucky to survive.
The recent shooting by Luigi Mangione of health-insurance executive Brian Thompson, which has been deemed terrorism by the Biden DOJ, has sparked debate over how health care is administered in America and by whom. It should be galvanizing change and reforms. Yet over the weekend Sen. John Fetterman, who received state-of-the-art care after his stroke, was chiding Americans who were understanding of Mangione’s motivation, if not his actions, rather than proposing some kind of legislative action.
My personal experience with the health care system and my insurance company specifically has been uniformly terrible. I have had to fight for every aspect of my care since my diagnosis. Just as I had to fight for every aspect of my late wife’s care while she was battling an aggressive stage-4 cancer.
It’s a lot, as we say, and I am wrung out. I am very sick, in extreme pain and striving every day to mitigate the despair I feel that voters chose to ignore the reality that Donald Trump was pushing false narratives, rather than choose the promise of a Kamala Harris presidency.
Over the weekend, I was reminded of how much worse it could get as I fell down an ideological rabbit hole on Twitter/X of right-wing support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., arguably one of the craziest and most dangerous nominees to Trump’s administration.
I have written a lot about Kennedy over the years and more recently since his abortive run for president and then embrace of Trump.
Kennedy is dangerous. His beliefs are fueled by conspiracies and threaten our entire society — but no one more than those of us already dealing with serious illness like I am.
I don’t want to die. It’s that simple. I have more books to write, more important journalism to do and friends and family to engage with. I have a life worth living and I would like to survive this cancer and get back to it sans suffering. I hope my doctors at Fox Chase Cancer Center can make that happen.
I don’t want Kennedy standing in the way of my or anyone else’s survival.
But reading through a series of posts by high-profile MAGA influencers on Twitter/X about Kennedy’s stances on established science — his refutation of AIDS being caused by HIV and his assertion that 5G technology causes cancer — just fueled my concern.
Kennedy believes, for example, that Dr. Tony Fauci developed the COVID virus. He also believes Fauci “experimented” on HIV-positive children in foster care, murdered them and buried them in a mass grave.
Full disclosure — the person who first reported this false claim about Fauci is notorious AIDS denialist Celia Farber. I replaced Farber as the AIDS columnist at SPIN magazine after a series of her stories there, and her relationship with the publisher, raised concerns.
Farber claimed that Fauci was experimenting on foster children who were children of women with AIDS who had either died or had abandoned their kids in the hospital after they were born. I had reported on these children and even visited them at Monte Fiore hospital in the Bronx in the ’90s when I was working for OutWeek and POZ.
What actually happened is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which Fauci ran for 45 years through seven administrations, did fund clinical trials evaluating HIV and AIDS treatments that enrolled HIV-positive children both in and out of foster care. But the report that found that 25 children in foster care — died during trials did not find that the trials were the cause of their deaths.
It was not “hundreds and hundreds of deaths,” there was no “mass grave filled with tiny coffins” and the story was thoroughly debunked.
As noted AIDS reporter Liz Highleyman said in response to my tweets about this, “Some of these orphaned & foster children had parents who died or were incapacitated by AIDS. Why shouldn’t they have had access to cutting-edge drugs in clinical trials?”
Exactly.
Kennedy repeating these false claims about Fauci speaks to his immersion in conspiracy theories over established science — something that should concern all of us as he is slated to run the entirety of the country’s health-care complex. Kennedy has already written self-published books about Fauci in which he cites the thoroughly discredited AIDS denialist Farber as a source.
Kennedy believes AIDS is caused by gay male promiscuity and use of poppers and other drugs — a claim from the ’80s that has long been revealed as simple homophobia, not science. Yet this is the foundation of Kennedy’s plans for healthcare reforms: revisit established science and turn it upside down. Known for being the world’s most famous anti-vaxxer, he has suggested erecting a statue of the disgraced British doctor, Andrew Wakefield, who claimed the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine causes autism.
In addition to reviving the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, Kennedy says vaccines don’t work and there is no proof that they do. When Kennedy said recently that the polio vaccine needed to be evaluated, Sen. Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor, warned Kennedy against any efforts to undermine polio vaccines.
Yet despite all this, even some Democrats — notably Cory Booker, Fetterman and Independent Bernie Sanders — have said they are open to listening to Kennedy and approve of some of his plans, like addressing obesity and removing additives from foods, issues the CDC and FDA have been attempting to address for years.
The bottom line is Kennedy cannot separate his quest for a healthier America that is less obese and eats better from these deeply disturbing beliefs that are anti-science and threaten the health of the nation.
So as I continue to fight my own health-care battle, it is my fervent hope that senators on both sides of the aisle commit to holding the health-care system, which dismisses and discounts patients, accountable. And are equally committed to making sure Kennedy and his dangerous conspiracy theories get nowhere near our health-care complex and the most vulnerable Americans among us.