‘It’s abhorrent’: Fellow doctors speak out against neo-Nazi protest at Brigham & Women’s

Doctors are speaking up in support of two of their peers associated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital who were targeted in demonstrations held by white nationalists outside the hospital last month.

On Jan. 22, two dozen neo-Nazis staged a protest outside the Boston hospital with a bedsheet emblazoned with the message: “B and W Hospital Kills Whites,” according to a GBH News report published earlier this week.

The protestors were directing their focus on a particular pair of doctors. They passed out fliers identifying two doctors — by name and with pictures — who have partnered with Mass General Brigham to make health care more equitable for non-white patients.

They are Dr. Michelle Morse, a former staff doctor at Brigham and Women’s who teaches at Harvard Medical School and serves as chief medical officer for the New York City Health Department, and Dr. Bram Wispelwey, an internal medicine and public health doctor at Brigham and Women’s who also teaches at Harvard.

The display prompted widespread condemnation from health care workers, doctors, and local officials, who say both doctors are focused on an incredibly important issue in the medical profession.

“At the Brigham, we have one mantra among us that runs deep: *never worry alone*,” Dr. Abraar Karan, a Stanford University infectious diseases doctor who previously worked at Brigham and Women’s, wrote on Twitter on Friday morning. “If Bram & @michellemorse are being targeted, we all are. I stand with them.”

“So sorry that you and Bram have been targeted in this way, it’s abhorrent,” Dr. Lauren Malishchak, chief medical resident at Brigham and Women’s, wrote to Morse in a tweet. “I stand with your work, which is critical to identify and break down policies and practices that lead to racial inequities.

Others on social media thanked the pair for their contributions and courage.

“TY for your courage that takes up so much energy and strength that could otherwise be channeled elsewhere,” Dr. Sophie Balzora, a doctor with NYU Langone Health, told Morse on twitter. “This is awful. And (it) needs more media attention for people to really see what #healthequity is up against.”

Boston City Council President Ed Flynn also released a lengthy statement on Thursday night, condemning the demonstrations and decrying “the growing extremism and creeping hate in our country.”

“It is wholly repugnant to read reports that two dozen neo-Nazis recently targeted medical professionals associated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital who have dedicated their careers to advancing healthcare equity, while also spreading hateful and false narrative that threaten these doctors’ safety and work,” the statement reads.

Morse told GBH her work is focused on holding “the medical industrial complex accountable for the harms that it’s caused to communities of color and to other communities, and push for racial justice and health equity in all of the institutions that I’m involved in.”

But backlash from white nationalists came after an article Morse and Wispelwey published last year in the Boston Review titled, “An Anti-racist Agenda for Medicine,” was posted on Twitter by a reader.

The piece was retweeted “by some right wing person, basically describing Bram’s and my work as racist or as somehow unfair to white people,” Morse told the outlet.

“This is what triggered this whole backlash,” Wispelwey told GBH.

Last spring, the doctors experienced “really extensive threats, not just to us personally, but to our hospital,” Wispelwey said. “And then most recently last week when a white nationalist and neo-Nazi group showed up at our hospital.”

Both doctors, however, said they will not let the demonstrators deter them from the work ahead.

“The fact that you have an avowed white nationalist neo-Nazi group show up at a hospital really speaks to the work that still remains to be done,” Wispelwey told GBH. “And it’s just so important that the work continue.”

Read the full GBH News report.