Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson told Newsmax Thursday that mandating cognitive fitness tests for older government officials, such as former President Joe Biden, is "not partisan" but "something that affects all of us."
"It's foolish of us not to be monitoring that on a regular basis," Carson said on "Wake Up America." "When a person turns 70 or 75 years old, they should have mental status tests done every year if they're in an important position. And that's nothing against them. It's a fact that we see happening in people who age, very frequently. Some don't happen, but we should have a mechanism in place to detect that and to keep everybody from suffering as a result of it."
The retired neurosurgeon said "there’s no question" that "ironclad" procedures need to be put in place that "take care of the health of … the people who are making important decisions in our government," while also being "transparent."
In the case of Biden, Carson said that evidence of the former president's mental decline can be seen in a series of videos taken over the years.
"We've got a long record here to compare how he was 10 years ago, five years ago, a year ago, and one can clearly see a decline, the kind of decline that we see in people who have some of the diseases associated with aging," he said. "The problem here is you have a person like that making important decisions that affect the entire country, that potentially affect the entire world.
"He has charge of the nuclear arsenal, and we're allowing that person, but probably more serious than that is we probably weren't allowing him. We were allowing unelected people acting in his stead and this is an incredibly dangerous situation. I hope it is investigated thoroughly and we put in place things to keep it from happening again."
Carson said part of a president’s complete physical examination "includes the mental status" so "it’s hard to believe that they did not detect there was a problem."
"You could detect that there was a problem even without doing a mental status test," he said. "So, there is a responsibility and I think those medical professionals should be called to account for their behavior."
As for Biden’s recently-announced aggressive prostate cancer diagnosis, Carson said "that really is a very suspicious situation."
"I was in government for four years and had care done at Walter Reed. It is top-notch care," he said. "That's not flimsy work that's done there. So, for one minute, I do not believe that it was incompetence. I think there's a transparency problem there. You're not going to come up with high-grade prostate cancer with metastasis to the bone out of the blue."
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Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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