It’s been telling to watch the a-flutter reaction of liberals to President Trump’s April 21 appointment of Sylvia Trent-Adams as acting U.S. Surgeon General after forcing the resignation of Barack Obama’s appointee of three years, Vivek Murthy. It’s as though incoming presidents are expected to live with their predecessor’s key administrative appointments forever. Never mind that Trent-Adams is a liberal’s “intersectional” dream as an African-American woman. And double-never mind that she was serving as deputy surgeon general when Trump appointed her and had spent 24 years in various positions in the Public Health Service Corps.
The main liberal beef with Trent-Adams seems to be that she’s—horrors—a nurse instead of a doctor, a fact that the New York Times trumpeted in its arch headline: “Nurse Replaces Surgeon General After Obama Appointee Resigns.” ABC News tweeted snobbishly: “Dr. Vivek Murthy—an Obama appointee—resigns as Surgeon General, replaced by deputy Sylvia Trent-Adams, a nurse.” That generated still more tweets, such as this one: “So there is no #surgeongeneral but now there is an #RNgeneral so … yeah? American healthcare is being downgraded on all fronts.” The tweeters seemed to think that the surgeon general actually performs surgery, in contrast to functioning as a public-health policymaker, which is what the position actually entails. The New York Times story did point out—in its very last paragraph—that Trent-Adams has a Ph.D. in nursing and health policy, which entitles her to be addressed as “Doctor” just like an M.D. But it would seem that few of the tweeters got to the end of the New York Times story.
The most significant thing about Trent-Adams’s appointment is that it may signal the end of one of the most irritating things about having a regular medical checkup these days: the intrusive and irrelevant questions about whether you have any guns in your house. It seems that you can’t go to a doctor for a sniffle nowadays without being asked about your firearms status, along with being asked about whether you use the seatbelts in your car, whether you wear a helmet when riding your bicycle, how old you were when you started having sex, and whether your “partner” (i.e. your husband or wife) makes you feel afraid. The gun questions have proved so rebarbative that Florida, at any rate, now has a law prohibiting physicians from inquiring about the role of firearms in their patients’ lives.
The 39-year-old Murthy was a staunch advocate of this kind of expansion of the idea of “public health” to include crusades for gun control, which is why the National Rifle Association vehemently opposed his Senate confirmation in 2014. He’s famous for arguing that gun violence should be defined as “a public health issue” that would presumably necessitate some sort of government supervision of firearms ownership. Murthy’s website is a kind of poster for the softer side of the surgeon general. It features a photo of him in his surgeon general’s uniform pushing the baby carriage of his infant son and describes him as “Dad, husband, physician, entrepreneur, public health buff and mango aficionado.”
So now seems a good time to wish Murthy all happiness with his baby boy and his mangoes and hope that Trent-Adams will start removing the surgeon general’s office from political questions that have little to do with people’s health. Even if she is “only” a nurse.
