The doctor portrayed in the film Concussion believes that poison, not the very real concussion Hillary Clinton suffered or some other sickness, may explain the presidential candidate’s health issues.
Clinton collapsed after leaving a 9/11 memorial event early on Sunday, with aides struggling to carry her into a waiting vehicle. She subsequently cancelled campaign events because of her illness.
Dr. Bennet Omalu took to Twitter to diagnose a conspiracy theory:
Omalu, as longtime readers of Breitbart Sports know, displays a penchant for making broad, grandiose claims without the backing of hard evidence.
In 2013, Omalu gave his imprimatur on scans of living players, including Dallas Cowboys great Tony Dorsett, purporting to show chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Omalu told ESPN that the results demonstrated a “reasonable degree of certainty that this is CTE until proven otherwise.” But when Breitbart Sports asked the media-friendly doctor whether he owned the rights to the product for which he provided a positive scientific assessment, Omalu went mute. An investigation by Breitbart Sports discovered Omalu listed as one of a handful of partners launching TauMark, a limited-liability company established under a different name in West Virginia. ESPN nowhere indicated that the doctor offering a glowing assessment owned the rights to the product under discussion.
That series of Breitbart Sports articles, which questioned boasts made on the website of TauMark regarding a supposed scientific breakthrough of diagnoses of CTE in the living, preceded a reprimand by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Breitbart Sports wrote in 2013 that “without any peer-reviewed data or FDA approval buttressing TauMark’s boast, nearly every major news outlet in the country gullibly reported the shadowy, for-profit venture’s claim about its commercial product’s ability to diagnose CTE in the living.” The FDA pointed out essentially the same thing in 2015. “The website suggests in a promotional context that FDDNP, an investigative new drug, is safe and effective for the purpose for which it is being investigated or otherwise promotes the drug,” the FDA wrote to Omalu’s TauMark colleague Dr. Gary Small, with the federal agency accusing the company of pushing a “misbranded” medical product in “violation” of federal law. The company scrubbed the website of the offending language at the government’s behest.
Late last year, Breitbart Sports broke the story showing that Omalu’s nonprofit charity gave more than half of its annual budget in 2011 to fund the controversial study on that product ultimately licensed by the limited-liability company, TauMark, that he subsequently launched with partners. “The Brain Injury Research Institute provided a gift of $73,000 to the UCLA Foundation in January 2011,” UCLA School of Medicine media relations staffer Mark Wheeler informed Breitbart Sports. “The funding supported a study of concussions in NFL football players under the direction of Dr. Gary Small. The work was done on the Westwood campus of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.”
The 2015 biopic starring Will Smith, and a subsequent opinion piece by the doctor himself, push the notion that Omalu discovered CTE. But the disease, certainly first seen in a football player by Omalu, initially came under discussion in the 1920s and received its name in medical journals in the 1940s long before Omalu’s birth. Nevertheless, the Washington Post on Tuesday referred to Omalu as “the man who discovered CTE” in a headline.
While Cyril Wecht-protege Omalu clearly loves himself, he loves Hillary Clinton, too.
Strangely, he thinks his candidate of choice does not suffer because of his culprit of choice. While elsewhere Omalu blames suicides, drug use, and other bad choices made by former NFL players on concussions, he strangely ignores the very real mild traumatic brain injury suffered by Clinton in 2012 to possibly explain some of her recent struggles. Instead, he stresses imaginary doses of poison administered by the surrogates of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, or some other malevolent force.
Like Omalu’s life, this is the stuff of a Hollywood movie.
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