By JASON COHEN
Physician and medical professor Dr. Vinay Prasad criticized the media on Thursday for not asking President Joe Biden the right questions to assess his cognitive capability.
Democrats have increasingly been encouraging Biden to drop out of the presidential race after his debate performance against former President Donald Trump, which caused worries regarding the president’s mental competence. Prasad on his YouTube channel said the media should challenge the president’s capability through asking tougher questions rather than pushing him to take a cognitive test.
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“The media, they’re so so relentlessly focused on whether or not he should get a neurologic test. I think they fundamentally misunderstand. Yes, if you’re his doctor, you might want to do tests on this gentleman, but if you’re vetting a candidate for this office, the test is learn how to ask better questions,” Prasad said. “The questions they ask are so terrible. Ask pointed questions, ask really questions that force him to retrieve memories, ask questions that really ask him to articulate.”
“Don’t ask open-ended questions that allow him to filibuster and just go back to saying the stock and trade things he says all the time that come out like rote memorization,” he continued. “Push him in different domains. You can actually assess someone for president if you are a competent journalist and ask the right questions. They don’t appear to do that.”
Corporate media’s years-long effort to quash questions regarding Biden’s mental fitness faced a substantial setback after the debate. Despite worries from Americans, legacy media outlets consistently downplayed their legitimacy.
“We have to admit that they’re completely dishonest. Before the debate, when 50 million Americans watched him with word-finding difficulties and things of that nature … they were running a media campaign that said any video you saw of him was probably doctored or it was taken out of context because, of course, the man is doing just fine,” Prasad said. “They never raised the question of, ‘is he performing, this 80-plus-year-old gentleman is up for the task of being president?’ They never raised that question. The moment that everyone saw it, and then the jig was up and they couldn’t conceal these deficits anymore … now they’re suddenly happy to run op-ed after op-ed and calls for him to step down.”
“They’re so dishonest, this media. What are you doing in the White House Press Corps? Don’t you see the man? Aren’t you assessing him daily? Why are you keeping that a goddamn secret?” he asked.
Biden recently sat down for an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in an effort to reassure voters that he is capable of being president, asserting his debate performance was just a “bad night” and that he is not cognitively diminished. The president also seemed to express an unwillingness to take a cognitive test.
“No amount of medical testing is going to answer the question of if somebody is fit enough to be president of the United States. Just like no amount of imaging and test questionnaires is going to tell you if a college kid is able to play in the NBA,” Prasad added. “You have to watch them play basketball and you have to watch him engage in the sorts of acts that one would expect from a president.”
“It would probably involve, I would imagine, being woken up in the middle of the night and having to get your opinion on a bunch of big issues and that might happen like many nights in a row, so you might have some chronic sleep deprivation,” he said. “How would you perform under those circumstances? You might get a sense for that if you were really grilling somebody in a vigorous dialogue and vigorous questioning, which the media didn’t want to do for all this time.”
