CNN Medical Analyst Hits Fetterman Camp for Not Disclosing ‘Severity’ of His ‘Significant Neurological Injury’

CNN medical analyst Jonathan Reiner criticized John Fetterman’s campaign for not disclosing the “severity” of his stroke, which the doctor called “significant.”

Fetterman struggled to speak effectively for a great deal of Tuesday night’s debate with Mehmet Oz. While he was given a closed captioning system to help him better process spoken words, his performance drew concerns about his fitness for office.

Reiner said the closed captioning did not work as believed because the Democratic Pennsylvania Senate nominee suffers from “expressive aphasia.”

“He’s had an injury to his brain in the area that helps someone process speech,” he said. “So, most people have thought that Mr. Fetterman’s injury was how he processed sound, which is why they gave him the prompter. But what was really apparent last night was that he has expressive aphasia. It’s a really common injury in people who have had a stroke.”

After CNN Tonight host Jake Tapper asked Reiner for a prognosis, the doctor said it was hard to tell.

“I know how much work it takes to recover and I admire Mr. Fetterman’s determination to do that, but he obviously had a significant neurological injury.”

Tapper then asked if Fetterman might improve, and Reiner said that is impossible to know because the campaign was not transparent about the stroke:

It is hard to know. Part of the problem is that, you know, the campaign was opaque at the very beginning. They didn’t really disclose the degree of his illness. We don’t really know how sick he was. In fact, his treating physicians were never made available to the press or the public, so we don’t really know how much Mr. Fetterman has actually recovered.

[…]

There is no sin in having a stroke. There’s a lot of honor in the dogged determination that it takes to recover, and I admire that. What I don’t admire is the way sort of the campaign has handled the disclosure of his illness.

Watch above, via CNN.