Oprah Winfrey offers vacation to ER doctor who spoke out about Arizona’s Covid challenges

‘We should be taking care of those taking care of us,’ Oprah tweeted on Friday

Oprah Winfrey has offered an all-expenses-paid vacation to an emergency room doctor in Arizona who claimed that he was fired from his job after revealing the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in the state. 

Dr Cleavon Gilman, an ER doctor in Yuma, has been tweeting since November about the state’s Covid response and hospital bed shortages.

Dr Gilman said that his messages led Yuma Regional Medical Center (YRMC), where he works via a contracting firm, to fire him.  

“We should be taking care of those taking care of us,” Oprah tweeted on Friday. 

“You’ll need a vacation once this pandemic is over—and I’ll gladly send you and your immediate family anywhere you want to go. I’ll be in touch."

Dr Gilman tweeted earlier this week: “I've always been HONEST about what I'm experiencing as an ER doctor on the frontlines of the pandemic, but @YumaRegional wants to SUPPRESS the TRUTH. 

“Healthcare providers must be able to communicate with the public during a deadly pandemic.”

The hospital has denied the doctor’s claims and said that Mr Gilman was still scheduled to work this weekend.

“It’s clear there has been a misunderstanding,” the hospital said in a statement on Thursday. “While he is not speaking on behalf of YRMC, we respect Dr. Gilman’s right to share his personal perspective on the pandemic.”

"We need good caregivers like Dr Gilman here," the statement added.

The doctor reportedly moved to the small US-Mexico border city in June to assist with fighting the coronavirus. He works for the hospital via EmCare/Envision, a contractor, according to the release from YRMC.

The doctor, who served as a hospital corpsman with the Marines and became chief resident of emergency medicine at  New York-Presbyterian Hospital at the beginning of the pandemic, began tweeting last month about how Arizona’s intensive care unit beds were dwindling.

“Just got to work and was notified there are no more ICU beds in the state of Arizona,” he wrote in November, in a tweet thread that was viewed tens of thousands of times.

The next day, he said that he was told by the staffing agency that the hospital didn’t want him back at work.

On Saturday, Arizona officially surpassed 400,000 recorded cases of Covid-19 as hospitalizations hit a record high.  

Last week, the Biden transition team reached out to Dr Gilman to thank him for his work on the frontlines.