Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center has quietly removed any trace of celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, current Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, from its website.
Columbia’s medical center recently removed all mentions of Oz and links to his pages from its website, according to The Daily Beast. Oz, who was listed as Vice-Chair of the surgery department and Department of Integrated Medicine, has been a professor at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons since 2001.
The Huffington Post reported in January that Columbia distanced itself from Oz by changing his title to “professor emeritus of surgery,” four years ago. The Ivy League school’s medical center removed Oz’s profile and “disconnected hyperlinks to that bio on a number of pages that mention Oz,” one day after the Huffington Post’s report, according to The Daily Beast.
Although a Columbia faculty listing says Oz is a “Special Lecturer in the Department of Surgery,” his name appears nowhere in website searches for doctors at the Irving Medical Center.
Professionals in the medical community have called on Columbia to remove Oz from its website as late as seven years ago over his alleged medical misinformation.
“Dr. Oz has repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops,” a group of ten physicians wrote in a letter to the university. “Worst of all, he has manifested an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”
Dr. Arthur Caplan, who signed the letter, accused Oz of promoting “quack cures for Covid” and “quackery to treat diseases.”
Caplan told The Guardian:
My question becomes, “What took so long?” He’s been a huge danger to public health in the U.S. and around the world for a long time with respect to quack cures for Covid and touting quackery to treat diseases. I was among the voices saying he had to be removed years ago. And I still think it’s the right thing to do because he really has forfeited credibility as a doctor. Whether that will matter in terms of the election, we shall see. I think it should, I doubt it will.
Oz testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety and Insurance in 2014 over his comments promoting a “magic” cure for weight loss. The subcommittee’s chair at the time, former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), criticized Oz for giving people “false hope.”
“I don’t get why you need to say this stuff when you know it’s not true. When you have this amazing megaphone, why would you cheapen your show?” McCaskill said during the hearing.
Oz recently earned the support of former President Donald Trump in his candidacy to replace retiring Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.
Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary will take place on May 17.
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