S.C. lawmakers give thumbs-down to health agency nominee

COLUMBIA, S.C. - A South Carolina Senate subcommittee voted Thursday against advancing the nomination of the man Gov. Henry McMaster chose to run the Department of Public Health.

Dr. Edward Simmer would be the first physician to head the agency which was created when the former Department of Health and Environmental Control was split into two agencies.

The Senate Medical Affairs Committee voted 12-5 against advancing Simmer’s nomination to a full Senate vote after a hearing in which senators asked questions of him.

The votes mostly followed party lines with one exception: the 12 votes against advancing Simmer’s nomination to the full Senate all came from Republicans and four of the five who voted in favor were Democrats. The fifth vote in favor of Simmer came from Republican Sen. Tom Davis, who represents Beaufort County.

Simmer has been serving as interim director of the SCDPH and McMaster nominated him to be the new agency’s first director.

McMaster responded to news of the vote with a statement on X:

“I remain resolute in my of Dr. Ed Simmer and am hopeful that the full Senate will see through the falsehoods and mistruths being spread about his service to our state and nation.”

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Simmer left immediately after the vote and has not yet provided a statement on the outcome of Thursday’s hearing.

What happens next in the process is not yet clear since the committee was still meeting as of Thursday afternoon after the vote.

Confirmation process overshadowed by COVID anger

Simmer has a vision of reducing infant mortality, fighting childhood cancers and reducing drug overdoses. But the process leading up to his confirmation as director of the state’s health department turned into a referendum on how the state responded to COVID five years ago and residual anger over lockdowns and vaccines.

That’s even though Simmer didn’t start working in the state until February of 2021, when he said the state had already reopened.

The man tapped to lead South Carolina’s public health agency says he won’t back down after facing threats, harassment and even vandalism.

At his state Senate hearing on March 20, some of the audience displayed stickers with his face crossed out.

Simmer, who asked his wife to stay home instead of coming to Columbia to him because of threats, said he was accosted in the hallway on his way to the meeting.

His vocal critics, including some Republican lawmakers, have derisively called him a double masker even after he explained his wife has underlying medical conditions that make COVID especially dangerous for her. He was maskless during that day’s hearing (and was maskless again during Thursday’s subcommittee hearing), but said he “will wear a mask again without hesitation if that is what it takes to protect the woman I love.”

Critics contend that he wants to become an all powerful health czar even though lawmakers gave the new Public Health Department’s leader no more power than his predecessors have had in more than a century when they split the unit from the environmental agency.

Simmer has the full backing of the Republican governor, who ed him when Simmer was hired to run what back then was the state’s combined health and environmental agency in 2021. The Senate approved the recommendation on a 40-1 vote.

But even the governor’s came with a backhanded knock on the federal government’s COVID response and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who advised Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the pandemic.

“He’s not a Dr. Fauci,” McMaster said in March, following that up with, “I know folks are furious at Dr. Fauci and I think Dr. Fauci messed up.”

Simmer said he has never ed mandating COVID vaccines and with the information he knows now, would not have recommended schools close or students be required to wear masks.

“These falsehoods and lies not only impact me — they are dangerous. They erode the public’s trust in our front-line health care workers and put the people who believe the lies and falsehoods at risk,” Simmer said after the March 20 hearing. “‘Enemy of medical freedom,’ ‘health czar,’ ‘not a real doctor,’ ‘evil’: These are just a few examples of what has been said about me, and nothing could be further from the truth.”

Simmer’s 14-page opening statement from that hearing left little time for questions from skeptical senators on the Medical Affairs Committee. Another meeting where senators have been promised they can ask every question they have will be held soon.

Republican Sen. Matt Leber of Johns Island called the opening statement “overly aggressive” and “unfortunate.”

Simmer said last month he regrets that all the COVID talk has overshadowed remarkable gains in public health in his historically unhealthy Deep South state, which he fell in love with after tiring of the winters in Cleveland and being stationed as a Navy doctor in Beaufort on the coast.

South Carolina ranks around 37th or 38th in many rankings of overall health after decades in the bottom 10 if not the bottom five.

Simmer has plans to get even better. The state is near the bottom in infant and mother deaths. The Public Health Department is working on a mobile maternity care center that will hit the road in 2026 and go to the state’s poorest counties, where the nearest obstetrician can be more than a 50-mile drive.

He is trying to combat preventable causes of early death like stroke and chronic diseases like diabetes. Just a short distance from South Carolina’s Statehouse is a ZIP code with one of the highest levels of diabetic amputations in the country.

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