Dr. Lisa Bardack, Hillary Clinton’s doctor and the head of internal medicine at Mount Sinai Health System, has examined the candidate and released a statement on her health in the aftermath of this morning’s fainting episode:
Clinton’s doctor: candidate has pneumonia, “is now re-hydrated and recovering nicely”
Dr. Lisa Bardack, Hillary Clinton’s doctor and the head of internal medicine at Mount Sinai Health System, has examined the candidate.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Will this quiet speculation about Clinton’s health, particularly among those who were certain the candidate was hiding a serious illness even before she exhibited symptoms? I doubt it.
But this is, in part, what campaigns are for. Clinton and Donald Trump have been following punishing schedules for well over a year now. If either of them was laboring under a serious illness, we would see a pattern of public fatigue, fainting spells, and canceled events. But we haven’t.
Back in April, I interviewed Clinton in Raleigh, North Carolina. The day was brutally hot. Before our conversation, Clinton gave a lengthy, high-energy economic speech to a crowd of 4,000. Within 10 minutes of finishing the speech, she was in a chair in front of me. After our 40-minute conversation — which, again, required her to put on her public face, keep her energy high, and talk almost nonstop — she immediately walked across the room to give an interview to a local Raleigh television station. After the two interviews, she spent 10 minutes glad-handing with the crew members.
I was exhausted just watching her. It’s very, very hard for me to believe that anyone keeping this kind of schedule, for this long, is secretly ill.
People’s health can change, of course. If Clinton is facing something more serious than a spell of pneumonia, it will become obvious soon enough. The rigors and relentlessness of the campaign reveals illness, as it did today. But Bardack’s note fits the evidence we have a lot better than the wild conspiracy theories we’ve heard.
