Hillary Clinton’s campaign has scrapped plans for her to fundraise on Monday and Tuesday on the West Coast after disclosing she has pneumonia.
Hillary Clinton has canceled her campaign trip to the West Coast due to her illness
On Sunday, Clinton’s campaign said she had become “overheated” after she abruptly left a 9/11 memorial service in downtown Manhattan. When a video surfaced showing her stumbling en route to her motorcade, the Clinton campaign then said she had been diagnosed with pneumonia the previous Friday, two days earlier.
Clinton’s campaign says she’ll be recovering today at her home in Westchester, New York, and is doing better.
”She was put on antibiotics, and advised to rest and modify her schedule. While at this morning’s event, she became overheated and dehydrated. I have just examined her and she is now re-hydrated and recovering nicely,” Clinton’s doctor said in a statement.
Media gets riled up over timeline released by Clinton campaign
As Vox’s Julia Belluz argues, there’s little to gain in speculating about the health of presidential candidates. Clinton, 68, had been cleared by her doctor last year as being in “excellent physical condition,” and the pneumonia diagnosis certainly doesn’t provide any basis for the wild and rampant conspiracy theories circulating about her health.
More likely to become a focus of scrutiny is why Clinton’s campaign didn’t immediately reveal that she’d contracted pneumonia. Her illness wasn’t disclosed until after someone published the alarming video of her struggling, at least raising the possibility that her team had hoped to keep the diagnosis a secret.
Politico compiled the reactions from a riled up press corps that fumed it hadn’t been told earlier about the diagnosis.
“Clinton’s health became a case study in how she and her team have struggled to communicate with the public,” writes the Guardian’s Lauren Gambino. “The Clintons’ reluctance to readily release information was again on display as her campaign complicated what could have been a simple explanation and turned it into an all-day drip of information.”
There’s signs this is already exacerbating Clinton’s famously frosty relationship with the press. Last week, the Clinton campaign pilloried NBC News for publishing a story about the candidate coughing. Here’s how campaign spokesperson Nick Merrill reacted to the story on Twitter, personally calling out the NBC News reporter by name:
The pneumonia disclosure makes that initial NBC News report look much more justified. And today, after news of her pneumonia broke, NBC News’ coverage didn’t give Clinton much benefit of doubt:
Clinton’s campaign appears to have, at best, withheld information from the public and — at worst — misled them by aggressively batting down “conspiracy theories” that her coughing fit was anything more than allergies. Opponents are already seeing the incident as proof of their claims that Clinton has been hiding health issues. And others may now be more incredulous of the campaign’s statements on her health.
… Did Clinton lose consciousness at all? After leaving the memorial, Clinton went to her daughter Chelsea’s apartment and was later examined by her doctor at her own home in Chappaqua, New York. Why was it decided not to visit a hospital immediately?
