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““Today, America’s heartbeat is in a code red in need of a defibrillator to shock it back to life.” ”
That was Dr. Mehmet Oz, confirming on his website that he is, indeed, running for the U.S. Senate to help America “heal.“
The celebrity heart surgeon and former “Oprah Winfrey Show” staple verified reports that he is running for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat as a Republican, in a statement shared on his official website, as well as in a column for the Washington Examiner.
“We are angry at our government and at each other,” Oz, 61, wrote on the conservative news site. “We have not managed our crises as effectively as past generations.”
““During the pandemic, I learned that when you mix politics and medicine, you get politics instead of solutions. That’s why I am running for the U.S. Senate: to help fix the problems and to help us heal.” ”
Oz described growing up as the child of “dirt poor” immigrants, which instilled his work ethic to become a success. And he also discussed his medical and television career (name-dropping Winfrey and his own “The Dr. Oz Show”) in listing his accomplishments in his column.
His TV show website also now doubles as a campaign site, inviting visitors to join his campaign by signing up for an email list and/or making a donation. And as a self-described “great surgeon” and “the right medicine” for the country, he adds that he will never censor ideas, which he argued has happened too often during the pandemic.
“In this emergency, we needed capable leaders ready to act — and we didn’t get that,” he writes. “The entire situation angered me.”
It should be noted that Oz has been scrutinized for some controversial medical advice, with a Senate panel chastising him in 2014 for using his TV show to hype weight-loss products and supplements as “magic weight-loss cures.” In 2015, a group of doctors sent an open letter urging Columbia University to dismiss him from the medical school’s faculty, calling him “a fake and a charlatan.”
And in April 2020, Oz apologized for suggesting that reopening schools during the pandemic may “only cost us” 2% to 3% of American lives. His comments had drawn outrage for suggesting that any American deaths would be an acceptable trade-off to help America get its “mojo back.”
