By Ben Johnson

Some historical moments cut through time and echo into the modern day, shedding wisdom throughout the ages. One such lesson comes from the most trying-yet-charming story about President Ronald Reagan. Crazed assassin John Hinckley tried, and thankfully failed, to assassinate the newly elected president on March 30, 1981. After Secret Service agents rushed him to the hospital, the seriously wounded Irishman turned to his doctors and quipped, “I just hope you’re all Republicans.”

“I’m a Democrat,” later admitted Dr. Joseph Giordano, who led George Washington University’s trauma team that day, “but I told him, ‘We’re all Republicans today, Mr. President.’”

How times have changed. One of the most dangerous of the Left’s panoply of harmful ideas is their growing insistence that doctors and nurses should politicize medicine. Injecting partisan or ideological ends into the healing arts comes under guises ranging from requiring CRT-focused courses for certification to insisting doctors try to spread pro-transgender or pro-abortion messages, to denying sick people from disfavored groups lifesaving health care.

The Biden-Harris administration’s HHS Undersecretary for Health, who was born Richard Levine but identifies as a woman named Rachel, implied transgender activism is part of the Hippocratic Oath, in which doctors promise to “do no harm” — a protocol many health care professionals feel they cannot uphold if they administer hormone injections to people or surgically remove healthy organs. Levine all-but dehumanized the vast majority of Americans who reject extreme gender ideology during an April 2022 speech to doctors at Texas Christian University (of all places). He lashed out, accusing them of “rejecting well-established science” and “basic human compassion”:

“Those who attack our community are driven by an agenda of politics. It has nothing to do with medicine. It has nothing to do with science. It has nothing to do with warmth, empathy, compassion, or understanding. They are rejecting the value of supportive medicine, rejecting well-established science, and simply rejecting basic human compassion. We as doctors and as people who love our communities and love our nation, have to confront the fact that the language of care and compassion that they’re using is being taken to [sic] granted to literally tear our communities apart. So, we have to stand up. We have to take a stand on behalf of those who are being hurt. That’s what we do in medicine, even when it’s difficult.”

To combat this, Levine asked doctors to “please proactively seek opportunities to speak” outside the “medical setting” to “school teachers, principals, school boards, professional organizations, recreation centers, county commissioners, and others who would benefit from this information in your perspective.”

According to one of the last administration’s top health officials, fulfilling the Hippocratic Oath requires doctors — not only to violate their conscience by injecting minors with experimental drugs — but to become full-fledged apostles of woke ideology, taking every opportunity to evangelize others in radical gender ideology.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, other interest groups have used nearly identical language about abortion. The late Cecile Richards, who served as president of Planned Parenthood, told Harvard’s prestigious T.H. Chan School of Public Health in May 2019:

“The state of Missouri, which already has abortion restrictions so impossible to comply with that only one [abortion business] remains where it is available, is refusing to renew that health center’s license. …

"This is 2019. So today, despite the progress we’ve made … the country is about to take an enormous step backwards — not because of science or medicine, but 100% because of politics. This is an in-real-time reminder that the biggest hurdles you will face in getting people the care they deserve will have a lot less to do with our public health care system and a lot more to do with our political system.

"It’s just not enough to be public health experts. You need to be advocates, and you need to be truth-tellers.”

Richards, too, asked physicians to abuse the doctor-patient relationship to extend the culture of death.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for doctors to become doctors unless they agree to promote the full cohort of liberal doctrines. Earlier this month, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hosted a session in which the speaker told doctors they have to be “actively anti-racist,” drawing on Ibram X. Kendi’s immoral notion that society should engage in “antiracist” racial discrimination. Imagine every doctor’s consultation ending with a lecture on unearned privilege, structural injustice, and the relative socioeconomic positions of gendered and non-gendered persons.

Too many doctors have heeded calls to politicize medical research specifically in the area that inspired Richards most: killing babies. All three strands of radical ideology can be seen when the National Institutes of Health gave $495,307 of taxpayers’ money to fund a study from Planned Parenthood employee Elizabeth Janiak, which concluded that “societal dynamics of power and oppression” create “disproportionate barriers” to abortion for “individuals who identify as [b]lack, [i]ndigenous, and people of color” and “individuals who are transgender or gender-nonconforming.”

Another study about infant mortality, which Supreme Court Justice and non-biologist Ketanji Brown Jackson cited in her dissent from the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling, erroneously claimed that black babies were 58% more likely to survive if they had a black doctor. But its researchers used flawed methodology that would have eliminated the alleged advantage — and they omitted the fact that white babies have a higher survival rate when delivered by white doctors. The study’s lead author, Brad N. Greenwood, frankly admitted his political intentions in a margin note written in his own hand: “I’d rather not focus on this. If we’re telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants this undermines the narrative.” The New England Journal of Medicine sought to prolong the DEI narrative by sending a questionnaire grilling health care organizations over how “structural racism” impacts their “care delivery.”

Ideologues continue to scheme ways to implant radical ideology into the muscle and sinews of the medical profession structurally. Do No Harm, a group of doctors who oppose inserting DEI policies into medicine, has identified no fewer than 10 accrediting organizations that require medical schools to expose future doctors to DEI indoctrination.

Worse than the spread of such ideology is its impact: Taking DEI to its logical extension, medicine will be handed out differently based on the patient’s ideology. Not Woke? May you rest in peace.

“If you’re not going to get vaccinated,” shouted then-CNN primetime host Don Lemon in 2021, “don’t go to the hospital, then, when you get sick! Don’t take up the resources from other people who are playing by the rules.” The legacy media virtually celebrated the deaths of unvaccinated Americans, especially Christian pastors, who refused to take a shot that was tested on aborted babies’ cells.

The medical establishment in Canada put Lemon’s admonitions into action. Sheila Annette Lewis, who had natural immunity to COVID, died in 2023 at age 58 after Alberta Health Services refused to place her on the priority list for an organ transplant unless she took the shot.

References to the China virus may sound like ancient history — but it was only last May that the Biden-Harris-anonymous-staffer administration introduced a pilot program financially incentivizing 90 of the nation’s 257 transplant hospitals to perform organ transplants based on the patient’s “health equity” score. The measure, which did not explicitly mention race, would take “concrete steps to remove racial bias … in the transplant process,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

By denying health care to some while prioritizing it for others, the Left has discovered the ultimate form of redistribution: the redistribution of life itself. Socialism transfers money from taxpayers, who earned it by trading hours of their lives for pay, to those who did not earn it. Now, the Left seeks to redistribute life and health itself.

Politicizing health care delivery violates the long-established medical rules (one might call them “norms”), which hold that one offers care to everyone in need regardless of extenuating life factors. This rule alone assures that hospitals financially deplete themselves by providing top-level care to uninsured illegal immigrants. (Strangely, Don Lemon never called on hospitals to deny lifesaving care to illegal immigrants in favor of “people who are playing by the rules.”) Christians know that premising whether someone will receive medical care on his political views is the exact opposite of the example set by Jesus, Who healed people of diverse ideological and religious beliefs alike: Jews and Gentiles, God-fearing believers and heretical Samaritans, the rich and the poor.

Now, more than ever, the world needs the moral sense of The Gipper, the compassion of Dr. Giordano, and the touch of the Great Physician.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.