Clinton to release more medical details after health scare
Xinhua, September 13, 2016 Adjust font size:
Hillary Clinton's campaign acknowledged on Monday it mishandled public concerns about Clinton's medical condition and said additional medical details of Clinton would soon be released.
The offer to release more Clinton's medical details came after weeks of blunt refusal to do so and was the latest step for the campaign to quell long-time speculation about Clinton's health that climaxed on Sunday after Clinton was videotaped being helped into a van while her feet appeared to be dragging on the ground.
"I think that in retrospect, we could have handled it better in terms of providing more information more quickly," said Clinton's spokesman Brian Fallon in an interview with MSNBC.
Clinton on Sunday morning abruptly left a 9/11 memorial in New York and her campaign initially told reporters that Clinton had been "overheated".
Soon a video shot by a witness surfaced online, in which an apparently ailing Clinton struggled to steady herself and had to be helped by two Secret Service agents into her van.
About 90 minutes after the episode, Clinton emerged and waved to onlookers.
Almost five hours after the release of the video, the Clinton campaign released a statement from Clinton's physician which read that Clinton had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday and left the memorial after becoming dehydrated and overheated.
The Clinton campaign did not disclose the diagnosis until the episode on Sunday.
"There's no other undisclosed condition. The pneumonia is the extent of it," Clinton's spokesman Fallon told MSNBC.
While Republicans seized on the secrecy surrounding Clinton's medical record to attack Clinton, even Clinton's allies criticized the Clinton campaign on Monday for lack of transparency.
"Antibiotics can take care of pneumonia," wrote David Axelrod, U.S. President Barack Obama's senior adviser on Twitter. "What's the cure for an unhealthy penchant for privacy that repeatedly creates unnecessary problems?"
Meanwhile, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who shared even less information about his own medical details than Clinton did, was also bogged down in controversy surrounding his brief medical report that stated that Trump would be the "healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency."
It was later disclosed that the doctor who wrote the only public documentation about Trump's health spent five minutes writing the report.
In his interview with Fox News on Monday, Trump said he would release "very, very specific numbers" from a medical exam he took last week. Enditem