An impromptu press conference following Dr. Mehmet Oz’s swearing-in as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was cut short after a young girl passed out as President Donald Trump was speaking.
Trump was in the middle of a stem-winding answer to a question on Iran and nuclear power when the six-year-old girl began to pass out.
Oz, a University of Pennsylvania-educated physician who was once a highly regarded heart surgeon before gaining prominence as a television presenter, quickly moved to attend to the young girl, who was a guest of his at the ceremony. He is now set to begin his tenure heading the U.S. medical agency, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The assembled members of the White House press corps who’d been brought to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in were quickly ushered out.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from left, swears in Dr. Mehmet Oz to be Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A young girl fainted during the swearing in ceremony (AP)
A White House official said of the event: “A minor family member fainted during Dr. Oz’s swearing-in ceremony in the Oval Office. We are happy to say she is OK.”
Moments before the alarming health incident, Oz — who ended his television career to mount an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for a Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022 — had been administered the oath of office by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist who Trump tapped to run the government’s medical and health care regulatory bureaucracy.
As he introduced Oz, Trump said the former television host had “come to this position as one of the nation’s most talented and beloved medical professionals,” but as he proceeded to recite highlights from Oz’s resume — including his Harvard undergraduate education, his medical degree from Penn (the president’s alma mater) and time as Director of the Cardiovascular Institute and integrative medicine program at New York Presbyterian Hospital and as a professor at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, the president appeared to be unfamiliar with that part of Oz’s life.
“Boy, oh, boy, Doc, I thought he just did a show,” he said. “I only know the show.”
He added that he’d become familiar with Oz’s former eponymous television program when he appeared on the show during the 2016 election amid questions about his own medical status.
Trump then recalled how Oz had counseled the then-presidential candidate to lose weight.
“You know why I know the show? Because he said, I’m a little overweight. I should lose some weight. I did a show, and that’s what I got out of it. That was not good,” he said.
