Dr. Oz Tells Oprah To Stay Out Of Senate Race, Urges ‘Compassion’ For ‘Transgender Folks’

By David Shankbone - Shankbone, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11597475

Republican candidate Doctor Mehmet Oz doesn’t want Oprah meddling in his race for a Pennsylvania Senate seat.

“I asked her to stay out. Don’t support me because if you get involved in any way, you’ll get hurt and I don’t want my friends hurt,” he said at an event in New York City.

Winfrey launched the cardio-thoracic surgeon’s rise to fame, when she began featuring him on her show as a health expert in 2004, and dubbed Oz “America’s doctor” during his more than 60 appearances. 

She gave him his own series, “The Dr. Oz Show” in 2009, which was produced through her company, Harpo Productions, and became an Emmy winning smash hit for ABC. The show concluded after eleven seasons due to his Senate bid.

“During the pandemic, I learned that when you mix politics and medicine, you get politics instead of solutions,” Oz said in an announcement for his candidacy. “That’s why I am running for the U.S. Senate: to help fix the problems and to help us heal.”

But in the past, he’s been called out for bad medicine for peddling diet pills on his show that led to a Congressional hearing and a $5.25 million settlement for false advertising in 2018.

The media has been publishing hit pieces targeting Winfrey for her connection with the doctor since his declaration, so she’s “involved” whether Oz likes it or not. 

New York Magazine slammed her “penchant for promoting pseudoscience,” while another article claimed Oprah was “almost single handedly responsible for the public prominence not only of Oz — a genuine doctor who became rich flogging medical misinformation.”

During Oz’s appearance he commented about transgender collegiate swimmer Lia Thomas, who has been shattering records in the women’s sport. 

“The suicide rate amongst transgender adults has grown, this is critical to understand,” he said. “We have to have compassion on this problem. It is a devastating one. And transgender folks who are adults, when they are processing this, have to figure out if they wanna keep living the lie – they don’t think they’re who they are – or be who they truly are.”

“But then you layer on top of that changes to our society that hurt other people in an effort to protect one group of people, and that’s not fair. That’s not fair,” Oz concluded.  

Surely Oprah’s going to get some flack for his remarks.


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