One of only about 150 people known to have the rare fatal condition, he traveled internationally to raise awareness and participated in the search for a cure.Sammy Basso, an advocate for research into progeria, an ultrarare fatal disease that causes rapid aging in children, who was known for living with gusto and humor as he faced the certainty of premature death, died on Oct. 5 near his home in Tezze sul Brenta, in the Veneto region of northern Italy. He was 28.Dr. Leslie B. Gordon, medical director of the Progeria Research Foundation, for which Mr. Basso served as global ambassador, said the cause was complications of the disease. Mr. Basso had survived longer than any other known person with progeria.Mr. Basso, who lived with his parents, was diagnosed with progeria at age 2.He was one of only about 150 people worldwide identified with the condition. He traveled internationally, most recently to China, to raise awareness; gave TED Talks; and participated with scientists from Harvard and the National Institutes of Health in a research group that is seeking a cure.“You couldn’t watch a presentation by Sammy without being captivated by his courage, his spunk, his smarts and his sense of humor,” Dr. Francis S. Collins, a former N.I.H. director who has long researched progeria, said in an email.Progeria, also known as Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, causes children to undergo rapidly accelerated aging; its effects include baldness, wrinkled skin, hardening of the arteries and a wizened stature. Mr. Basso was about 4 feet 5 inches tall and weighed about 44 pounds.At the same time, individuals with the condition, whose average life expectancy is 14.5 years, do not experience senility.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

He identified the cause of a respiratory condition behind 10,000 infant deaths a year and helped design a drug to drastically reduce mortality rates.Dr. John A. Clements, a towering figure in the field of pulmonary research who in the 1950s solved one of the great mysteries of the human lung, then helped to save thousands of lives by designing a drug to treat lung failure in premature infants, died on Sept. 3 at his home in Tiburon, Calif., north of San Francisco. He was 101.The death was confirmed by his daughter Carol Clements.In 1949, Dr. Clements was fresh out of Cornell University Medical College (now Weill Cornell Medical College) and working for the Army as a physiologist, charged with investigating the effects of nerve gases, when he became intrigued by the miraculous mechanics of human breathing.How could the millions of tiny air sacs in the lungs deflate when a person breathes out, but not collapse like a balloon? Dr. Clements theorized that there must be some chemical relaxing the surface tension of the air sacs, and he went on to identify the substance as a surfactant, a class of lubricants that work like household detergents.In a 1956 paper, based on research done with a crude instrument he built himself, Dr. Clements demonstrated the presence of a surfactant in the lungs.His work led to a breakthrough three years later by two Harvard researchers whom Dr. Clements advised: pulmonary surfactant, they found, was absent in premature babies with undeveloped lungs who died of respiratory distress syndrome, or R.D.S.Dr. Clements in 1988. He began his research began shortly after he finished his education, when he was working for the Army as a physiologist.via UCSFWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A Public Health Service employee, he turned whistle-blower after learning of decades-long research involving hundreds of poor, infected Black men who were left untreated.Peter Buxtun, a whistle-blower who in 1972 exposed a 40-year government experiment to track the effects of syphilis in Black men in Alabama — who were neither told that they had the disease nor offered treatment — died on May 18 in Rocklin, Calif., near Sacramento. He was 86.His death, in a memory care center, was from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said John K. Seidts, a close friend. The death was first reported on Monday by The Associated Press, to which Mr. Buxtun had turned over his files and which in 1972 published the first news articles about his disclosures.Exposure of the Tuskegee Study, as the federal research was known, created a political furor that shut it down, but the study cast a long, dark shadow as an episode of official racism embedded in government policy. It was one of the worst medical ethics scandals in U.S. history, tarnishing the do-no-harm image of doctors and, especially, sowing mistrust of the medical establishment among many African Americans.Mr. Buxtun, the son of a Jewish father who fled Czechoslovakia before World War II to escape persecution, was working as a venereal disease investigator for the U.S. Public Health Service in San Francisco in 1965 when he overheard a co-worker talking about the Tuskegee Study taking place in rural Alabama.One of his first acts was to visit a library to research the crimes of Nazi doctors in World War II.He contacted the Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta (now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), which had cooperated with the Public Health Service in overseeing the Tuskegee Study. The agency, making no effort to conceal the study from a government employee, sent him a manila envelope stuffed with reports.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A physician, scientist and academic, he brought together experts across disciplines to focus on the economic, political and social causes of poor health, not just the biological factors.Howard H. Hiatt, a physician, scientist and academic who reshaped the field of public health, steering it away from the narrow study of infectious diseases toward big-picture issues of fiscal and societal accountability in medicine, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 98.His son Jonathan Hiatt said the cause was pulmonary hypertension.Harvard Public Health, a magazine published by the Harvard School of Public Health, where Dr. Hiatt was dean for 12 years, wrote in 2013 that Dr. Hiatt “made public health the conscience of medicine.”Early in his seven-decade career, Dr. Hiatt worked in Paris with future Nobel Prize winners on the discovery of messenger RNA, a key element of cellular biology. He later visited the White House to urge President Ronald Reagan to end the nuclear arms buildup of the era, which Dr. Hiatt called “the final epidemic.”A Harvard-trained physician who held leadership posts at some of the country’s most prestigious hospitals, Dr. Hiatt was an outspoken critic of the inequities in American health care. He accused American medicine of having a bias toward expensive, high-tech treatments while excluding millions of people from basic care.In a 1987 book, “America’s Health in the Balance: Choice or Chance?,” he argued for government-run universal health insurance, modeled on aspects of the systems in Britain, Canada and China. “I am particularly anxious to reach those who are so callous as to accept the prospect of two-class medicine in America,” he told The Toronto Star.At the Harvard School of Public Health (now the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), where Dr. Hiatt was dean from 1972 to 1984, he brought experts together across disciplines, including biostatistics and health management, to focus on the economic, political and social causes of poor health, not just the biological factors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A psychiatrist and a prolific author, he criticized what he referred to as a “nonsystem” that left vulnerable people on the streets to fend for themselves.Dr. John A. Talbott, a psychiatrist who championed the care of vulnerable populations of the mentally ill, especially the homeless — many of whom were left to fend for themselves in the nation’s streets, libraries, bus terminals and jails after mass closures of state mental hospitals — died on Nov. 29 at his home in Baltimore. He was 88.His wife, Susan Talbott, confirmed the death.Dr. Talbott was an early backer of a movement known as deinstitutionalization, which pushed to replace America’s decrepit mental hospitals with community-based treatment. But he became one of the movement’s most powerful critics after a lack of money and political will stranded thousands of the deeply disturbed without proper care.“The chronic mentally ill patient had his locus of living and care transferred from a single lousy institution to multiple wretched ones,” Dr. Talbott wrote in the journal Hospital and Community Psychiatry in 1979.In a career of more than 60 years, Dr. Talbott held many of the leading positions in his field. He was president of the American Psychiatric Association; director of a large urban mental hospital, Dunlap-Manhattan Psychiatric Center, on Wards Island; chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore; and editor of three prominent journals: Psychiatric Quarterly, Psychiatric Services and The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease — which he was editing at his death.Dr. Talbott exerted influence not as a researcher of the brain or neurological drugs but as a hospital leader, an academic and a member of blue-ribbon panels — including President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Mental Health — and, especially, through prolific writings. A clear and muscular polemicist, he wrote, edited or contributed to more than 50 books.“I admired him for taking the directorship of Manhattan State Hospital and his belief that psychiatrists should take the hard jobs and not just do private practice on the Upper West Side,” Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a prominent psychiatrist and the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va., said in an email.In 1984, during Dr. Talbott’s presidency, the American Psychiatric Association released its first major study of the homeless mentally ill. The study found that the practice of discharging patients from state hospitals into ill-prepared communities was “a major societal tragedy.”“Hardly a section of the country, urban or rural, has escaped the ubiquitous presence of ragged, ill and hallucinating human beings, wandering through our city streets, huddled in alleyways or sleeping over vents,” the report said. It estimated that up to 50 percent of homeless people had chronic mental illnesses.Six years earlier, Dr. Talbott had published a book, “The Death of the Asylum,” which railed against both the broken system of state hospitals and the broken policies that replaced them.In an interview with The New York Times in 1984, he acknowledged that psychiatrists who had championed community-based treatment as an alternative to institutions, including himself, bore part of the blame.“The psychiatrists involved in the policymaking at that time certainly oversold community treatment, and our credibility today is probably damaged because of it,” he said.In an account of Dr. Talbott’s career submitted to a medical journal after his death, a former colleague, Dr. Allen Frances, wrote, “Few people have ever had so distinguished a career as Dr. Talbott, but perhaps none has ever had a more frustrating and disappointing one.”Dr. Frances, the chairman emeritus of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, explained in an interview that Dr. Talbott had been a leader in the field of “community psychiatry,” which held that mental illness was influenced by social conditions — not just a biological disposition — and that treatments required taking into account a patient’s living conditions and the range of services available.Community psychiatry was supposed to be the alternative for patients no longer warehoused in run-down, often abusive state hospitals. A new generation of drugs held promise that patients could live at least semi-independently.“They were working hard to get psychiatry to be less stodgy, less biological, less psychoanalytical and more socially and community oriented,” Dr. Frances said of Dr. Talbott and others who championed community psychiatry.But the high hopes for robust outpatient treatment in community settings were never adequately realized. The Community Mental Health Act, a 1963 law championed by President John F. Kennedy, envisioned 2,000 community mental health centers by 1980. Fewer than half that many had been opened by then, as funding failed to materialize or was diverted elsewhere.At the same time, deinstitutionalization cut the number of patients in state hospitals by 75 percent, to fewer than 140,000 in 1980 from 560,000 in 1955.“The disaster occurred because our mental health delivery system is not a system but a nonsystem,” Dr. Talbott wrote in 1979.Dr. Talbott speaking at an antiwar protest at Riverside Church in New York in 1969. He became active in the antiwar movement after serving as a captain in the Medical Corps in Vietnam.Don Hogan Charles/The New York TimesJohn Andrew Talbott was born on Nov. 8, 1935, in Boston. His mother, Mildred (Cherry) Talbott, was a homemaker. His father, Dr. John Harold Talbott, was a professor of medicine and an editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association.In 1961, Dr. Talbott married Susan Webster, who had a career as a nurse and hospital administrator, after the couple met during intermission at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Along with his wife, Dr. Talbott is survived by two daughters, Sieglinde Peterson and Alexandra Morrel; six grandchildren; and a sister, Cherry Talbott.He graduated from Harvard College in 1957 and received his M.D. from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1961. He did further training at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital/New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.Drafted during the Vietnam War, he served as a captain in the Medical Corps in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. He received a Bronze Star for persuading troops to take their malaria pills.“The reason they weren’t taking them was because a case of malaria was a ticket home,” he later explained. “Then I scared the hell out of them by showing them examples of what malaria could lead to.”Once he was home, Dr. Talbott became active in the antiwar movement. He was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The next year he helped organize a protest at Riverside Church in Manhattan in which the names of soldiers killed in Vietnam were read aloud by a procession of speakers, including Edward I. Koch, Leonard Bernstein and Lauren Bacall.After retiring as chairman of psychiatry at the University of Maryland in 2000 after 15 years, Dr. Talbott indulged a lifelong appreciation for fine dining by contributing to online food sites. In 2006, he began a blog, John Talbott’s Paris, in which he chronicled meals he ate on frequent visits to the French capital.

He worked for the passage of major public health legislation; most notably, he helped secure millions in federal dollars for research into sudden infant death syndrome.Dr. Abraham B. Bergman, a pediatrician who was instrumental in passing a federal law to combat sudden infant death syndrome, a once misunderstood loss that caused not just parental heartbreak but guilt and blame, and who put his stamp on other enduring public health laws, died on Nov. 10 in Seattle. He was 91.The cause of his death, on a family member’s boat, was amyloid heart disease, his son Ben Bergman said.In the 1960s and early ’70s, Dr. Bergman was president of the National Foundation for Sudden Infant Death, a grass-roots group that supported parents who had lost children to what once was commonly called crib death. Although SIDS, as the syndrome became known, was the leading killer of infants less than a year old, its cause was unknown. Parents often blamed themselves, marriages broke up and, in some cases, authorities investigated for child abuse.“What we do to those parents is crime,” Dr. Bergman told The New York Times in 1972. “The police investigate, there’s a coroner’s inquest, and often the family doctor abandons the parents.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? 

It began with a spat over crudités. It has escalated into one Senate hopeful who is openly mocking another’s health after a stroke.Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, has taunted his Democratic rival, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, about his stroke recovery, suddenly thrusting an issue both candidates had tiptoed around into a central theme of one of the most watched races of the year.Mr. Fetterman said on Tuesday that he would not participate in a debate in early September, implying that his recovery from his stroke in May was not complete enough for him to perform at the peak of his abilities. His decision came after a day of goading by the Oz campaign.“As I recover from this stroke and improve my auditory processing and speech, I look forward to continuing to meet with the people of Pennsylvania,” Mr. Fetterman, who returned to campaigning this month, said in a statement.Earlier in the day, the Oz campaign had issued a list of bogus “concessions” it would make if Mr. Fetterman agreed to a Sept. 6 debate hosted by Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV, including “We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby” and “At any point, John Fetterman can raise his hand and say, ‘Bathroom break!’”More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsEvidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a New York special election is the latest example.G.O.P.’s Dimming Hopes: Republicans are still favored in the fall House races, but former President Donald J. Trump and abortion are scrambling the picture in ways that distress party insiders.A Surprise Race: Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat seeking re-election in Colorado, is facing an unexpected challenge from Joe O’Dea, a novice Republican emphasizing more moderate positions.Campaign Ads: In what critics say is a dangerous gamble, Democrats are elevating far-right candidates in G.O.P. primaries, believing they’ll be easier to defeat in November. We analyzed the ads they’re using to do it.The ugly turn in the race, whose outcome could help determine which party controls the Senate after the fall elections, opened Dr. Oz, who left a career as a heart surgeon and TV celebrity to run for office, to accusations of resorting to low blows. While there is a long tradition in American politics of candidates’ questioning rivals’ health and fitness for office, Dr. Oz seized on the issue as he has been reviving his struggling candidacy.The attacks have pried open an issue that the Fetterman campaign has sought to control — Mr. Fetterman’s health — by avoiding free-for-all questioning from the news media or voters since the candidate’s return to campaigning this month.After suffering a stroke days before the primary, Mr. Fetterman had a pacemaker and defibrillator implanted. His campaign at first released little information. Eventually, it disclosed he had been diagnosed with a heart condition, cardiomyopathy, which makes it harder for the heart to pump blood to the body. In a statement at the time, Mr. Fetterman’s doctor said he should be able to campaign and serve in the Senate without problems if he takes his recovery “very seriously.”Before returning to the campaign trail on Aug. 12, Mr. Fetterman acknowledged he sometimes dropped or slurred words but was improving daily.At an Aug. 23 appearance in Pittsburgh, his speech was halting, and he sometimes searched perceptibly for the right words. Conservative news outlets and commentators seized on clips from the appearance to portray Mr. Fetterman as unfit.For months during his convalescence, the Fetterman campaign consisted largely of insulting Dr. Oz on social media, including calling him a carpetbagger from New Jersey. That effort paid off with millions of online interactions and a flood of donations.Then, when Mr. Fetterman made fun of Dr. Oz for a resurfaced video in which Dr. Oz was shopping for what he called “crudités” in the vegetable aisle, to demonstrate the impact of inflation, the Oz campaign returned fire in a different way.“If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly,” an Oz spokeswoman, Rachel Tripp, said in a statement.The Oz campaign continued to bring up the issue of Mr. Fetterman’s health to attack him for not committing to a series of five debates. Dr. Oz insinuated that his opponent was shirking a confrontation.Asked in a radio interview Tuesday whether his campaign went too far in attacking Mr. Fetterman for causing his stroke by skipping vegetables, Dr. Oz struck what seemed like false solicitude: “John Fetterman should be allowed to recover fully, and I will support his ability as someone going through a difficult time to get ready.” Later in the day, the Oz campaign embraced an openly sarcastic tone when it released its list of debate “concessions.”Mr. Fetterman reacted strongly. “Today’s statement from Dr. Oz’s team made it abundantly clear that they think it is funny to mock a stroke survivor,” Mr. Fetterman said in a statement. “I chose not to participate in this farce.”“My recovery may be a joke to Dr. Oz and his team, but it’s real for me,” he added.Democratic strategists in Pennsylvania not affiliated with the Fetterman campaign said that questions about his health or appearance in debates were unlikely to shake his support, which two recent polls put at an edge of four or five percentage points over his rival.“As a Democrat, I would rather have Oz talking about debates — an issue that few voters care about — than talking about inflation,” said J.J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist. “And Fetterman’s stroke was widely reported, so voters’ concerns may already be baked in the cake.”Many Republican base voters have been slow to coalesce behind Dr. Oz because of suspicions that he is neither a true conservative nor a member of the Make America Great Again movement. Seeing influential conservatives take up the issue of Mr. Fetterman’s health — including the Fox News host Laura Ingraham and the commentator Ben Shapiro — may help secure those Republicans’ support for Dr. Oz.However, there is also the potential for backlash against Dr. Oz. On Wednesday, Mr. Fetterman released a video in which he asks a roomful of voters, “How many of you have had a big health challenge in your life?”“Can you even imagine that if you had a doctor that was mocking your illness or ridiculing that?” he added. “Well, here we are.”

The celebrity physician, a candidate in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for Senate, has a long history of dispensing dubious medical advice on his daytime show and on Fox News.A wealth of evidence now shows that the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were not effective at treating Covid-19 and carried potential risks.But in the early months of the pandemic, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician with a daytime TV show, positioned himself as one of the chief promoters of the drugs on Fox News. In the same be-the-best-you tone that he used to promote miracle weight-loss cures on “The Dr. Oz Show,” he elevated limited studies that he said showed wondrous promise.His “jaw dropped,” he said, while reviewing one tiny study from France, calling it “a game changer.” In all, Dr. Oz promoted chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in more than 25 appearances on Fox in March and April 2020.When a Veterans Affairs study showed that Covid-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die than untreated patients, that advocacy came to an abrupt halt.“We are better off waiting for the randomized trials” that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, had been asking for, Dr. Oz told Fox viewers.As Dr. Oz jumped last month into the Republican primary for Senate in Pennsylvania, where his celebrity gives him an important advantage in a crucial race, he tied his candidacy to the politics of the pandemic. He appealed to conservatives’ anger at mandates and shutdowns, and at the “people in charge” who, he said, “took away our freedom.”But the entry into the race of the Cleveland-born heart surgeon, a son of Turkish immigrants who has been the host of “The Dr. Oz Show” since 2009, also brought renewed scrutiny to the blemishes on his record as one of America’s most famous doctors: his long history of dispensing dubious medical advice.In ebullient language, he has often made sweeping claims based on thin evidence, which in multiple cases, like that of hydroxychloroquine, unraveled when studies he relied on were shown to be flawed.Over the years, Dr. Oz, 61, has faced a bipartisan scolding before a Senate committee over claims he made about weight-loss pills, as well as the opposition of some of his physician peers, including a group of 10 doctors who sought his firing from Columbia University’s medical faculty in 2015, arguing that he had “repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine.” Dr. Oz questioned his critics’ motives and Columbia took no action, saying it did not regulate faculty members’ participation in public discourse.He has warned parents that apple juice contained unsafe levels of arsenic, advice that the Food and Drug Administration called “irresponsible and misleading.” In 2013, he warned women that carrying cellphones in their bras could cause breast cancer, a claim without scientific merit. In 2014, the British Medical Journal analyzed 80 recommendations on Dr. Oz’s show, and concluded that fewer than half were supported by evidence.Two researchers who worked on “The Dr. Oz Show” for a year during a break from medical school in the 2010s said in interviews that the show’s producers had originated most of its topics, often getting their ideas from the internet. But the researchers, whose job was to vet medical claims on the show, said that they had little power to push back, and that they regularly questioned the show’s ethics to one another and discussed quitting in protest.“Our jobs seemed to be endless fighting with producers and being overruled,” said one of the former researchers, both of whom are now physicians and insisted on anonymity because they said they feared that publicly criticizing him could jeopardize their careers.According to the former researchers, the show’s producers conjured an imaginary, typical viewer named “Shirley,” a woman whose children were grown and who had time to focus on herself. The standard advice for many ailments covered on the show — obesity, sluggishness, back pain — was exercise, the researchers said. But there was a quota on how often exercise could be mentioned.Shirley watched daytime TV and didn’t want to exercise, the researchers said they were told.Dr. Oz’s on-air medical advice on both his show and Fox News has taken on greater significance as he enters the political realm. His promotion of hydroxychloroquine grabbed President Donald J. Trump’s attention and contributed to early misinformation about the virus on the right.“Information can harm — that’s the key thing we need to appreciate here,” said Harald Schmidt, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “His track record is pretty concerning. What we’ve seen so far does not instill confidence that this will help reasonable politics.”Dr. Oz, kneeling, rose to fame as a medical expert on Oprah Winfrey’s show.Jemal Countess/ Getty ImagesDr. Oz declined to to be interviewed for this article. His campaign manager, Casey Contres, said in a statement that the doctor had always put patients first and fought the “established grain” in medicine.“Dr. Oz believes it was truly unfortunate that Covid-19 became political and an excuse for the government and many in the corporate media to control the means of communication to suspend debate,” Mr. Contres added. “From the start, therapeutics meant to help with Covid-19 were regularly discounted by the medical establishment, and many great ideas were squashed and discredited.”Over the years, when pressed about offering unproven medical advice, Dr. Oz said his goal was to “empower” Americans to take control of their health. Grilled by senators in 2014 about false claims he made for weight-loss products, he said, “My job on the show, I feel, is to be a cheerleader for the audience.”He also said it was his right to use unscientific language. “When I feel as a host of a show that I can’t use words that are flowery,” he told the senators, “I feel like I’ve been disenfranchised, like my power’s been taken away.”In using the politics of the pandemic to shape his campaign for an open seat — one pivotal to Senate control in the midterms — Dr. Oz may be in tune with primary voters in Pennsylvania. The race has drawn candidates echoing Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, including Jeff Bartos, a developer, and Carla Sands, a former ambassador. David McCormick, a hedge-fund executive married to a former Trump administration official, is expected to join the field soon.The criticism Dr. Oz has received over the years for spreading misinformation has done little to tarnish his celebrity, as measured by his long-running TV program, whose distributor announced that the show would end in January when its host departs.Still, misinformation about the coronavirus emanating from the Trump White House and conservative news sites helped politicize the nation’s response to the pandemic, with deadly consequences in many Republican areas of the country.Although Dr. Oz spoke strongly in favor of masks and vaccines on Fox, his championing of unproven treatments early on sharply contradicted infectious-disease experts like Dr. Fauci who urged caution.In Pennsylvania, as around the country, counties that voted by large margins for Mr. Trump in 2020 have had lower vaccination rates and higher death rates from Covid than counties that voted heavily for President Biden.Yet at one point early in the pandemic, he said that reopening schools was an “appetizing opportunity” that might cause the deaths of “only” 2 to 3 percent of the population. He later walked back the statement.“I can’t believe he took the same oath that I did when we graduated,” said Dr. Val Arkoosh, an anesthesiologist and county official in the Philadelphia suburbs who is running in the Democratic primary for Senate. “That oath is about first doing no harm and always putting your patients first. I just think he’s a quack, to be honest.”In reply to Dr. Arkoosh, Mr. Contres said that Dr. Oz had performed thousands of heart surgeries and had “helped countless patients live a better life.”Dr. Oz testifying before the Senate subcommittee on consumer protection in 2014, when senators pressed him on claims he had made about weight-loss pills.Tom Williams/CQ Roll CallIn Dr. Oz’s 2014 appearance before the Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, Claire McCaskill, then a Democratic senator from Missouri, quoted a bit of his TV sales patter back to him: “You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type — it’s green coffee extract.”Dr. Oz admitted to the senators that his claims often “don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact.” A study he had cited about green-coffee bean extract was later retracted and described by federal regulators as “hopelessly flawed.” The supplier of the extract paid $3.5 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission.Dr. David Gorski, a surgery professor at Wayne State University and longtime critic of alternative medicine, said Dr. Oz’s emergence as a Fox News authority on the coronavirus was no surprise him.“He could have gone the route of trying to be more reasonable and careful, vetting information, trying to reassure people where the science was still unsettled,” Dr. Gorski said. “But of course, that wouldn’t be Dr. Oz’s brand.”Early in the pandemic, on March 20, 2020, Dr. Oz appeared on several Fox News shows trumpeting what he called “massive, massive news” — a small study by a divisive French researcher, Dr. Didier Raoult, who claimed a 100 percent cure rate after treating coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, or Z-Pak. At the time, with Covid-19 cases and deaths rising rapidly, hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial treatment, was being studied in multiple countries and adopted by hospitals without much evidence. Mr. Trump hyped it repeatedly at White House news conferences as part of his effort to minimize the crisis. Dr. Oz communicated with Trump advisers about speeding the drug’s approval to treat Covid. On March 28, the F.D.A. authorized its emergency use. On Fox, Dr. Oz noted that the Raoult study, with just 36 participants, was not a clinical trial, but his enthusiasm overran his caution. The study was the “most impressive bit of news on this entire pandemic front,” he gushed. On April 1, as Dr. Oz called on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York to lift restrictions on hydroxychloroquine, a public health expert, Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University, cautioned Fox viewers that “the facts are just not in” on the drug.There was much confusion in the early days of the crisis about how the virus spread and how to slow it, with some expert views reversed by new information. The Raoult study quickly fell apart. Only six patients had received the two-drug combination, all with mild or early infections. One who was reported “virologically cured” on Day 6 was found to have the virus two days later. Six other patients treated only with hydroxychloroquine were omitted from the final results, including one who died and three others who were transferred to intensive care.On April 3, the board of the research journal that initially published the study said it did not meet the “expected standard.” In June 2020, the F.D.A. revoked emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. That November, the National Institutes of Health concluded that the drug held no benefit in treating Covid-19.By then, Dr. Oz’s once-daily appearances on Fox had tapered off. He was rarely seen on the network this year. But he returned to Sean Hannity’s show on Nov. 30 to announce his candidacy, seizing the opportunity to push back at critics of his medical career.“Doctors are about solutions,” he said. “But instead, people with good ideas are shamed, they’re silenced, they’re bullied, they’re canceled.”Susan C. Beachy

Warning of Texas-style laws nationwide, the party believes it can use the issue to turn out suburban women in the Virginia governor’s race this fall and the 2022 midterms.VIRGINIA BEACH — Kenzie Smith is “not big into politics,” she said, and while she votes faithfully in presidential elections, for Democrats, she is less interested in off-year races, such as those seven weeks away in Virginia for governor and the legislature.But the recent news that the Supreme Court had allowed Texas to ban most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest, grabbed her attention.The fear that such a restrictive law, which she called “insane,” could conceivably come to Virginia if Republicans take power has sharpened her desire to turn out on Election Day. “If there are laws like what’s going on in Texas coming here, I’d absolutely be motivated to go to the polls over that,” said Ms. Smith, 33, a marketing consultant.The Supreme Court’s decision on Sept. 1 to let Texas enact the country’s most restrictive abortion law came as a grievous blow to abortion rights advocates, a long-sought victory for abortion opponents and, for Democrats, a potential political opportunity.As the party mobilizes for next year’s midterms, its first big test on the issue will come in the Virginia elections this fall. Democrats are hoping to win a tight governor’s race and keep control of the legislature in a state that has moved rapidly to the left. Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat who is running for his old office, has repeatedly promised to be a “brick wall” against anti-abortion measures, and has played up his defense of abortion rights at a debate last week, on the campaign trail and in fund-raising appeals.Democrats in Virginia and beyond are focusing in particular on suburban women, who played a large role in electing President Biden, but whose broader loyalty to his party is not assured. With Republicans smelling blood in next year’s midterm elections as Mr. Biden’s approval ratings slip and the economy faces a potential stall over the lingering pandemic, Democrats are looking for issues like abortion to overcome their voters’ complacency now that Donald J. Trump is gone from office.In more than two dozen interviews in the politically divided city of Virginia Beach, the largest in the state but essentially a patchwork of suburban neighborhoods, Democratic-leaning and independent female voters expressed fear and outrage over the Supreme Court’s green light for the Texas law. Many said it intensified their desire to elect Democrats, although historically, single issues have not driven turnout waves; candidate personalities and the overall economy have.Even a number of women who said they favored Republicans noted that they also supported abortion rights — which may explain why G.O.P. candidates in Virginia have played down the issue, scrubbing anti-abortion comments from campaign websites and walking back some remarks.In a debate on Thursday between candidates for governor, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican, said, “I would not sign the Texas bill today.” But he dodged when asked if he would sign a six-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape and incest. He affirmed that he supported a “pain-threshold bill,” which generally outlaws abortion after 20 weeks.Mr. McAuliffe said he was “terrified” that “the Trump Supreme Court” could overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision granting a constitutional right to an abortion. He said he supported “a woman’s right to make her own decision to a second trimester.” He misleadingly said that Mr. Youngkin “wants to ban abortions.”Early in the campaign, a liberal activist recorded Mr. Youngkin saying that he had to play down his anti-abortion views to win over independents, but that if he were elected and Republicans took the House of Delegates, he would start “going on offense.” The McAuliffe campaign turned the recording into an attack ad.Ellen Robinson was “horrified” by the Texas law.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesKathleen Moran said the Supreme Court’s decision on the Texas law “scared” her.Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesRepublicans portray Mr. McAuliffe as favoring abortions up to the moment of birth, trying to tie him to a failed 2019 bill in the legislature that would have loosened some restrictions on late-term abortions. Virginia law permits abortions in the third trimester if a woman’s life is in danger.Polling on abortion shows that Americans’ attitudes have remained stable for decades, with a majority of around 60 percent saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases. In Virginia, slightly fewer people, 55 percent, agree, according to the Pew Research Center.However, in a contradiction that illustrates the moral complexities of the issue, national polls also show that majorities favor abortion restrictions that are impermissible under Roe, such as outlawing second-trimester abortions in most cases.A Washington Post-Schar School poll of Virginia conducted this month, after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Texas law, found that abortion ranked low among voters’ concerns, with only 9 percent saying that it was their most important issue in the governor’s race.The starkness of the Texas decision — and the prospect that the Supreme Court could overturn Roe next year in a case involving a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi — has sharpened the issue.Virginia Beach presents a test case of the fraught abortion issue on the front lines of America’s shifting electoral landscape. The large population of military families has long lent a conservative cast to local politics, but last year the city voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, Mr. Biden, for the first time since Lyndon B. Johnson. Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat and former Navy commander whose congressional district includes Virginia Beach, is among Republicans’ top targets for 2022.The city stretches from saltwater taffy shops on the touristy Atlantic beaches to quiet streets of brick homes that lace around the area’s many bays. Outdoor conversations are interrupted by earsplitting military jets, which rarely draw a glance skyward.Ellen Robinson, a retired nurse, who identifies as a political independent, was “horrified” by the Texas law and said that if the court overturned Roe, “I think it would be the beginning of fascism in this country.”Kathleen Moran, a technical editor in the engineering field, who favors Democrats, said the Supreme Court’s decision on the Texas law “scared” her.“I have boys who will be dating women,” she said. “I have nieces. This goes back to the whole ‘white men get to make all the decisions about everything.’”Ms. Moran said she was more intent on voting after the court declined to halt the Texas law, which the Biden administration is trying to block.“We are in a really dangerous situation,” she said. “Obviously for abortion, we don’t want to become Texas, but on a lot of issues we could lose what is now a blue state.”While many Republican women across Virginia would most likely support stricter abortion laws, few conservative-leaning women in suburban Virginia Beach expressed support for a six-week abortion law or a reversal of Roe v. Wade. Overall, while these women didn’t always embrace the “pro-choice” label, they agreed that women should be able to make their own reproductive decisions.Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, dodged a question at a debate about whether he would sign a six-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape and incest.Carlos Bernate for The New York Times“I know Republicans have been against abortion forever, but as a woman, I think I ought to be able to choose myself,” said Janis Cohen, 73, a retired government employee. Her lawn featured a parade of signs for G.O.P. candidates. When it was pointed out that one of them, Winsome Sears, who is running for lieutenant governor, has said she would support a six-week abortion ban, Ms. Cohen fired back that the current governor, the Democrat Ralph Northam, was what she considered an abortion extremist.In 2019 the governor, a pediatric neurologist, seemed to suggest that a delivered baby could be left to die if the mother requested an abortion while in labor with a deformed fetus unlikely to survive. Republicans across the country seized on the comments as sanctioning “infanticide.” Mr. Northam’s office called the accusations a bad-faith distortion of his views.Polls of the Virginia governor’s race have generally forecast a close race, including one by Emerson College last week with the candidates within the margin of error.Nancy Guy, a Democratic state delegate who flipped a Republican-held seat in Virginia Beach by just 27 votes in 2019, said that before abortion rose as an issue in recent weeks, “most people were complacent and not paying attention.”Ms. Guy’s opponent has pledged that if elected, he will donate his salary to a so-called crisis pregnancy center that steers pregnant women away from abortions. The contrast could not be more clear to voters who follow the issues. Still, Ms. Guy said, with the news constantly churning, it is difficult to know what will drive voters nearly two months from now to cast ballots.Nancy Guy, a Democratic state delegate, said that before abortion rose as an issue in recent weeks, “most people were complacent and not paying attention.”Carlos Bernate for The New York TimesDemocrats in Virginia made huge strides during Mr. Trump’s divisive leadership, culminating in 2019, when the party took control of both the State Senate and House of Delegates. But Democrats’ majorities are slim, and Republicans believe they have an anti-incumbent wind at their backs this year. Three statewide positions are on the ballot on Nov. 2 — governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general — along with all 100 seats in the House.The field director for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia said that on average, 10 to 15 volunteers were on door-knocking shifts, compared with 25 to 40 two years ago, a worrying sign for supporters of abortion rights.Han Jones, Planned Parenthood’s political director in Virginia, added: “People are exhausted with elections and exhausted with Donald Trump’s rhetoric and feel like they can take a break. We could easily go red in this election alone if Democratic voters who are not feeling as passionate or leaned in don’t turn out to vote.”A team of Planned Parenthood canvassers who visited a neighborhood of attached town homes recently encountered general support for Democrats, but not much awareness of the election or enthusiasm for it.One voter, Carly White, said abortion was a touchy subject in her household. “I’m for Planned Parenthood but my husband is not,” she said, stepping outside a home with a small, precisely trimmed lawn. “I think the issue is, he’s a man. He’s never grown a baby. I just can’t — I don’t like somebody telling me what I can do with my own body.”