DJ Weiser

Abdul El-Sayed Needed Babysitters When He Was Health Director Because he isn't a real doctor, Detroit and Wayne County both had to hire actual doctors to make health decisions By Charlie LeDuff @Charlieleduff Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is not a doctor. That’s not me saying that, it’s the State of Michigan. Even so, El-Sayed got paid like a doctor, pretended to be a doctor, and broke state law doing so. As executive director of the Detroit Health Department and then of the Wayne County Health Department, El-Sayed was prohibited from making medical decisions because he was not and is not a licensed to practice medicine in Michigan (or anywhere else for that matter.) The state allows non-doctors like El-Sayed to be the chief bureaucrat of a local health department, but only if there is a chief medical officer to make actual health decisions. And so, El-Sayed in his short tenures in both Detroit and Wayne County was babysat by two qualified female physicians, and at least one was paid much less than El-Sayed. (Normally the actual doctor earns approximately 30% more than the bureaucrat.) So while El-Sayed plays physician in campaign commercials, the women were doing the actual work. As it happens, El-Sayed was not even qualified to be chief bureaucrat. Again, according to state law, the director of a health department must have an advanced degree in medicine or public health AND at least three years experience in health administration. El-Sayed did not have the required admin experience, but this is Wayne County, where the law is optional for machine hacks like “Dr.” Phoney El-Baloney. Under El-Sayed, the chief medical officer for Detroit in 2016 was Dr. Joneigh Khaldun. El-Sayed went on to run for governor and lost. He then became a TV doctor for CNN as a Covid expert and got almost everything wrong. Dr. Khaldun went on to become the chief medical executive for Gov. Gretchen Whitmer—and, like El-Sayed, she got almost everything wrong about Covid, including school closings and commingling infected people in the state’s nursing homes. El-Sayed resurfaced in 2023 in Wayne County. Still, he had no certification. No residency. No patients. Insufficient medical experience to satisfy state law. Minor details in the Wayne County Machine. El-Sayed got the job, but still couldn’t make medical decisions or supply health care for 150 children locked in the juvenile jail. Still, he was paid an eye-popping $279,000 a year by the time he left to run for Senate last year. (A few days following his announcement, the county machine granted him a $72,000 “consulting contract.”) As El-Sayed played doctor, the actual chief medical officer, Dr. Avani Sheth, was paid $235,000, or nearly 20% less than El-Sayed. Interestingly, El-Sayed’s successor as executive director of the county health department is paid $180,000—a $99,000 pay cut for the position. El-Sayed claims on his social media posts to despise financial misogyny. But El-Sayed doesn’t seem to mind it when it’s posted to his bank ledger. What to call him? Fake doctor? Paper doctor? Unlicensed physician? Call El-Sayed whatever you want, just know he can’t make house calls.