".Now El-Sayed thinks women who have breast cancer shouldn't get treatment or funding because of their "social power and privilege."
"Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, is facing growing backlash for his insensitive and sexist comments over breast cancer funding. Last week, El-Sayed drew fire from Republican Mike Rogers after a 2012 essay resurfaced in which El-Sayed attacked the "Pink Ribbon Lobby" and wrote that breast cancer funding was prioritized because the disease affects people with "social power and privilege."
"Here's some of what El-Sayed wrote in that essay, during Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 2012 (emphasis added):
The article, which explored NIH (and Department of Defense) disease-specific funding patterns in relation to changes in the density and lobbying dollars of disease-specific interest groups, suggests that interest groups can successfully lobby the NIH to increase the amount of funding allocated to their diseases of interest.
The findings are at once reassuring and deeply unsettling.
For people suffering with certain diseases, the idea that their voices, along with others afflicted with similar ailments may be heard and listened to certainly has appeal. Even as the research horizon is long, and investments may not yield tenable improvements in disease outcomes within their lifetimes, it’s satisfying to know that their advocacy may have “made a difference.”
But here’s the catch. We all get sick, and everybody dies of something. And what’s to say that one person’s cause is more important than another’s?...
The breast cancer lobby has done an incredible job raising my “awareness” of Breast Cancer—if I weren’t an epidemiologist, it would have me believing that the women around me were in imminent danger. And perhaps they are—but the numbers suggest other diseases I should be far more worried about. In fact, women are twice as likely to die of lung cancer than breast cancer, and nearly six times as likely to die of heart disease." . . .
. . . "El-Sayed, a recipient of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship and graduate of Columbia’s medical school, ultimately spent little or no time in the Icahn School job, returning in 2015 to his native Detroit when he was named executive director of the Detroit Health Department. He would leave that role to launch an unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign in 2018, and later directed the Department of Health, Human, and Veterans Services in Wayne County, Mich. While El-Sayed has a medical degree, he never did a residency and has never been licensed to practice medicine.
"In 2015, in New York, Singh and El-Sayed were two ambitious young men with prestigious credentials and far-left views about health policy. The complaint alleges that El-Sayed, who was 30 at the time, told one female AIGH employee "that he was excited to not be working with ‘anyone over 40.’" That woman was 41 at the time of that conversation." . . .
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