US surgeon general was warned by his mom to avoid politics, but he jumped into the fray anyway

Associated Press

MIAMI (AP) — The dated gold and silver trophies packed in the china cabinet of Dr. Vivek Murthy’s childhood home still boast the surgeon general’s many talents, from dance performances to math competitions.

Growing up in a Florida suburb, it seemed to his family that Murthy could succeed at just about anything.

But when a middle school world history teacher suggested he might one day make a good secretary of state, his mom staged an intervention.

“She got really worried,” Murthy said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press last month, while his mom giggled at his retelling of the story. “She called my dad. She said, ‘You need to come home and talk to him because he’s thinking about going into politics.’”

Now, in his second term as the “Nation’s Doctor,” Murthy hasn’t run from the political, as his mother hoped. He’s charged toward it.

He has taken on powerful tech companies, accusing their addictive algorithms and dangerous content of negatively affecting children’s mental health. Earlier this year, he went as far as asking Congress to approve a surgeon general’s warning label on social media, on platforms such as Instagram or TikTok. In June, Murthy released his most politically charged report yet, declaring that gun deaths and injuries in America had reached such critical mass that they have created a public health crisis.

A focus on guns

Republicans had long feared Murthy harbored plans to state that gun violence a public health crisis, speculation that almost derailed his first appointment to the job by Democratic President Barack Obama a decade ago.

Murthy attracted Obama’s attention while Murthy was working as an internist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, when he corralled thousands of doctors to lobby for passage of the Affordable Care Act. The political organizing also led him to his wife, Alice Chen, who signed onto his letters from Los Angeles, where she was working as a doctor. The two bonded over text messages and phone calls across time zones.

But Murthy’s social media comments describing guns as a “health care issue” sparked a delay of his confirmation and left the country without a surgeon general for more than a year, with even some Democrats refusing to approve him. Republican President Donald Trump promptly fired Murthy.

Murthy was reconfirmed under the Biden administration in 2021, with support from every Democratic senator and a handful of Republicans. He has an annual salary of $191,900.

As surgeon general, Murthy had largely stayed quiet on gun violence, until now.

He points out that the numbers changed after he became surgeon general for the second time: Gun violence became the leading killer of U.S. children, surpassing car crashes and cancer in 2021. More than 4,752 children died from firearm injuries that year, a study from the American Academy of Pediatrics says.

The stories too awful to ignore that he heard while traversing the country on listening tours have helped shape what issues he decides to weigh in on, he said.

There was the grandmother who told him she does not send her grandson to school in light-up sneakers just in case they might attract the attention of a school shooter. And the mom who, after surviving a mass shooting, always reconsidered leaving the house in flip-flop sandals in case she had to flee another one.

“When you hear these stories again and again from middle school students, from high school students and college students, those stories stick with you,” Murthy said. “It was inescapable to me that we had to do something about this.”

Murthy’s report is full of statistics that show gun deaths, suicides and injuries are worsening. He concludes by saying Congress should act — with laws that ban large-capacity magazines for civilian use, require universal background checks for gun purchases, restrict their use in public spaces and penalize people who fail to safely store their weapons.

The reaction was predictable. Doctors and Democrats praised it. Republicans jeered. The National Rifle Association called Murthy’s report a “war on law-abiding citizens.” Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., accused him of “flip-flopping,” noting that Murthy had told him gun violence would not be a focus of his term.

Murthy believes his report, which has no teeth, might move the conversation, even a little. He sat down with the AP just four days after Trump had been nicked in the ear with a bullet from a would-be assassin during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. There was little call to take up gun measures after the latest shooting to shock the nation.

“My hope is that we can shift looking at it as a polarizing and political issue and see it for what it is, which is a public health issue that affects all of us from people in small communities in America to people … running for high office in our land,” Murthy said.

The surgeon general is also emphasizing a different side effect of gun violence: the mental health toll. He dedicates an entire chapter and four pages of his 40-page report to the issue, noting that half of U.S. teenagers 14 to 17 worry about school shootings.

Americans’ declining mental health

The demise of Americans’ mental health, a topic that seems to have bipartisan interest in Congress but little consensus on how to deal with it, has been a theme in nearly every report released during Murthy’s second term.

Past surgeon generals have rarely weighed in on mental health in such a robust way.

Many focused on physical health: alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, breastfeeding, exercise and healthy bones, for example. Murthy, in his reports, has spent the past three years delving into social media’s impact on youth, loneliness, health care worker burnout and misinformation.

Those are matters he did not expect to tackle when he was first appointed to the job more than a decade ago.

But Murthy sees them as problems that are straining Americans’ overall health.

Loneliness skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people culled their friend groups and cut back on the time they spent in person with those friends –- down to a historic low of just 20 minutes every day. The state of loneliness, Murthy concluded in his 2023 findings, can increase the risk of premature death by 30%.

Murthy spent his time during the pandemic and in between terms consulting and giving speeches. He raked in $2 million working with companies such as Netflix, Airbnb and Carnival Cruises, and wrote a book, “Together,” focused on loneliness.

He shares in that book how he felt unprepared to handle the impact loneliness had on his patients’ health and happiness. His reports could change that for future doctors.

“The response has been overwhelmingly positive, not just from the public but from the medical and public health profession” Murthy said. “And I have a theory as to why, which is that doctors are actually seeing loneliness and mental health challenges on the front lines themselves in exam rooms, in hospitals each and every day.”

After his term ends in March, Murthy does not know what is next. But he said he still wants to focus on mental health and loneliness.

‘People are everything’

Murthy traces his interest in eradicating loneliness back to the Miami suburbs, where he retreated last month with his wife and two young children to spend a few summer days under the palm trees of his childhood home alongside his parents, sister and grandmother.

It was here where he says he learned the most about the power of relationships. First, from watching his parents, immigrants from India, work hard to carve out a community of their own in a city where they knew no one when they arrived decades ago. The pair launched a weekend school for the children of other Indian immigrants to learn about the culture and music of their homeland.

As he grew older, he helped his mother in the front office of his dad’s family medical practice. When tragedy struck, he went with them to visit patients’ homes, including a trip to visit a grieving widow in the middle of the night.

“They taught me from the youngest of ages that people are everything,” Murthy said of his parents, Myetraie and Hallegere. “Whenever they had a patient who was in need, a friend who lost a job or lost a loved one, they would be there on the phone or in person, bringing food or just sitting by the bedside and holding their hand.”

Even in the July humidity and heat, his family crowds the kitchen to fry dosas, an Indian crepe, and kesari bath, a sweet raisin wheat mix, over the hot oven. His mother stuffs plastic bags full of food, insisting any visitors in the house take one home. Murthy’s 7-year-old son wraps himself around his father -– and won’t let go -– as dinner is served up in the kitchen.

It’s a long-standing tradition for the Murthys.

Decades ago, after homework was finished, the family ate dinner together every night, said Hallegere Murthy. He still tells his own patients to treat family dinners as a “therapeutic session” and recommends they put away cellphones while catching up at the dinner table.

“I always tell my patients family unity and family interaction is very important, especially if the only time you all can be interacting is during the dinner time,” Hallegere Murthy said.