Who is Dr Kevin O'Connor? Joe Biden brings in his longtime physician to replace Trump's White House doctor
Joe Biden will be appointing his longtime physician, Dr. Kevin O'Connor, as the new physician to the President in the White House. O'Connor has served as Biden's doctor for over a decade, and will now replace Dr. Sean Conley, a White House official has revealed. O'Connor, who previously served as Biden's physician when he was vice president, is a retired US Army colonel who served in the 82nd Airborne Division, the 75th Ranger Regiment, and the United States Army Special Operations Command, according to NBC News.
In 2019, O'Connor administered Biden's physical and deemed the then-presidential-hopeful "healthy" and "vigorous." However, the new White House physician has his work cut out for him considering Biden is the oldest president in history at 78.
Dr. O'Connor has been an Army family physician, teacher, flight surgeon, and hyperbaric medical officer for the last twenty-two years, according to GW Medical Faculty Associates. He has served in "clinical, academic, leadership, and operational assignments" at Fort Bragg and Fort Carson and completed several tours of duty with the 82nd Airborne Division, 75th Ranger Regiment, and the United States Army Special Operations Command. As a colonel, O'Connor was deployed on a number of classified combat rotations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Bosnia.
In the United States, physicians can practice either as a doctor of medicine or a doctor of osteopathic medicine. Both O'Connor and Conley hold degrees in osteopathic medicine. According to the American Medical Association, about a quarter of medical students in the country train at osteopathic medical schools. Furthermore, doctor of osteopathic medicine programs have historically touted their methods as "more holistic" than conventional medicine programs. Dr. Conley had replaced Dr. Ronny Jackson as former President Donald Trump’s doctor at the White House in 2018. Earlier that year, Jackson had declared that Trump was in “excellent” health.
In October 2020, Jackson -- who is now a member of the House of Representatives -- said he believed as a physician that then-candidate Biden didn't have the “mental capacity” or “cognitive ability” to run the country.
“I’m pretty familiar with what it takes both physically and cognitively to do that job and what the demands of that job are,” Jackson told reporters on a call organized by the Trump campaign, New York Post reported. “As a citizen, not as a candidate running for Congress, but as a citizen of this country, I’ve watched Joe Biden on the campaign trail and I am concerned and convinced that he does not have the mental capacity, the cognitive ability, to serve as our commander-in-chief and our head of state,” he added.
Jackson also said that he was concerned by the way Biden became visibly frustrated or angry when he got lost in the middle of a sentence. “As a physician, I can tell you that’s a mechanism that folks that are having cognitive difficulties use to move on and to get out of a situation,” Jackson added. He clarified that he was not criticizing Biden because of his age and added that some people nearing 100 could still be “as sharp as a tack." Biden, he said, did not belong to that group. “This is a demanding job from a cognitive standpoint, you have to be locked on, you have to be articulate, you have to process lots and lots of information and multitask,” the former White House doctor asserted.