By David S. Shimm, M.D.
Two years ago, we learned the story of Dr. Lara Kollab. During 2011–2013, while an undergraduate at John Carroll University, she tweeted many antisemitic comments, including: “I’ll purposely give all the yahood [Jews] the wrong meds,” and “People who support Israel should have their immune cells killed so they can see how it feels to not be able to defend yourself from foreign invaders.” In 2014, she matriculated at Touro Osteopathic Medical School, deleting her Twitter feed after acceptance. She graduated in 2018 and commenced training in internal medicine at the Cleveland Clinic that July. However, after the contents of her Twitter feed became known to her training program, she was forced to resign in October 2018. She secured another position for the following year, but this offer was rescinded when her past came to light. In August 2020, the State Medical Board of Ohio permanently revoked her medical license, ending her medical career.
Recently, ten years after Dr. Kollab’s undergraduate antisemitic tweets, Drs. Bram Wispelwey, a 2014 Ben-Gurion University medical school graduate, and Michelle Morse, a 2008 University of Pennsylvania medical school graduate, both on the faculty at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, published “An Antiracist Agenda for Medicine” in the March 17, 2021 Boston Review. In this article, they go beyond standard calls for reparations in the direction of what they term “redress.” They describe their algorithm for their hospital’s electronic medical record, which, in their own words, provides “a preferential admission option for Black and Latinx heart failure patients to our specialty cardiology service” by specifically flagging for specialty cardiology care the medical records of patients with specific adverse cardiovascular risk factors, but only if they are non-white. Here, they advocate intentionally withholding medical care from white patients in favor of non-white patients — never mind the violence that this does to medical ethics, to the trust essential to the doctor-patient relationship, and to the principles of equal protection and non-discrimination enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment and subsequent legislation.
Without excusing Dr. Kollab’s bigoted comments in any way, it is important to note that hers was the immature ranting of an undergraduate in, or just past, her teen years. Moreover, it is plausible to suppose that she outgrew her teenage intemperance, since she performed well enough in her medical training at an institution with a Jewish tradition to secure a residency training slot at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic — not an easy lift for a physician with a D.O. degree. On the other hand, Drs. Wispelwey and Morse were mature adults who had completed medical school and residency training and were Harvard faculty members when they published their own bigoted comments. Contrast the different outcomes: for suggesting, while an undergraduate before even starting medical school, that she would mistreat Jewish patients, Dr. Kollab lost her medical career before it even started, while after establishing a hospital protocol to explicitly and specifically mistreat white patients, Dr. Wispelwey remains on the Harvard Medical School faculty, and Dr. Morse has been named chief medical officer of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
If only Dr. Kollab had fantasized about mistreating white patients instead of Jewish patients, she’d be practicing medicine today as a progressive hero.