A CNN doctor who painted a dark picture of President Donald Trump's health appears not to have practiced medicine since her residency, instead spending her career as a diversity, equity, and inclusion specialist. She is also an "apostle" of a church whose leader describes Trump as the "antichrist."
Chris Pernell, a frequent television doctor on CNN and other news stations, warned last week that President Trump's broadly unremarkable diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency could be more than it seemed.
"It is a disease that is progressive," Pernell said. "And what that means is that if there aren't conservative treatments, elevation, compression, medication, if needed, to treat accompanying ulcers or skin changes, it can worsen and actually put a person at risk for deep venous thrombosis."
Pernell went on to suggest other potential complications as a result of chronic venous insufficiency.
"If a person is sitting or standing for prolonged amounts of time, you can get chronic venous insufficiency, and while it is not life threatening, it can be debilitating," she added. "You can develop ulcers in addition to skin discoloration. And if a person develops ulcers, you want to make sure those ulcers aren't infected."
Though Pernell does have an M.D. from the Duke University School of Medicine and completed a residency with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, her LinkedIn page does not mention having treated patients. After completing her degree at Duke, receiving a Master’s degree in public health from Columbia, and her time with Johns Hopkins, Pernell served as "Chief Strategic Integration and Health Equity Officer" at University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey. In that role, she drafted the hospital's first "equity and inclusion strategy," hired the hospital's first "director of equity and inclusion," and instituted mandatory implicit bias and structural racism training.
Pernell said during an October 2022 appearance on the Karen Hunter Show that she faced multiple compliance probes from hospital leadership, stemming in large part from her public criticism of Trump and Republicans. In 2021, for instance, she compared vaccine-skeptical Americans to white supremacists on MSNBC's airwaves.
Pernell had resigned from the hospital a month earlier after an intensive and unsuccessful campaign to become CEO. She claimed during her conversation with Hunter that she had been "forced out," blaming her departure on racism.
"I have had an outpouring of physicians—in particular black physicians, black corporate executives, women generally, and people throughout the field of medicine and public health—stand up and say, 'What happened to you, unfortunately, is a part of a pattern of abuse,'" Pernell said. "'It is an abusive relationship between white power structures and black executives.'"
Pernell now serves as director of the NAACP's Center for Health Equity, a role in which she works to "drive equitable health outcomes and transform healthcare systems through a comprehensive socioeconomic approach valuing the whole person," according to her LinkedIn profile.
Pernell's work in the Garden State also led to her being tapped to serve on the New Jersey Reparations Council as a member of its health equity committee. In that capacity, she approved a report calling not only for reparations but also for non-citizen voting, ending deportations, and a new state agency that "would disproportionately serve to expand homeownership to Black New Jersey families."
In addition to her work on equity, Pernell has also pursued an ecclesiastical career as an "apostle" of the Bet Hashem YHWH church movement founded by her brother, Timothy Pernell Jr.
Timothy Pernell Jr. has described white Evangelical Christians as agents of Satan.
"White evangelicals call pedophile Trump, anointed, called, chosen, and appointed by Christ," he wrote last week on Facebook. "They are SICK !!!!!! Trump is a pedophile and a rapist and an antichrist. White evangelicals have done the work of Satan and attempted to destroyed [sic] America."
He has accused Trump of sex crimes and of being the devil in other social media posts.
"White Evangelicals have been supporting and working with the Devil, Trump!" he wrote. "Trump has raped and molested under aged White Girls and White Evangelicals knew this and still supported them!!!!"
Videos on YouTube show Dr. Chris Pernell delivering fiery sermons in her capacity as "apostle" of the Bet Hashem YHWH movement.
Pernell, responding to a Washington Free Beacon request for comment, explained her professional focus.
"As a board certified preventative medicine and public health physician and fellow, my practice is firmly rooted in population health, health equity, and health systems transformation," she wrote in an email. "I am expertly trained in general preventive medicine and public health, having completed a residency at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. My credentials and professional background have been demonstrated through over a decade of experience in community health, workplace health, and public health. My biography and curriculum vitae are public knowledge. My population-based practice is transparent and focused on preventing death and disease, promoting health equity and racial justice, advocating for the human experience, and saving the lives of all people, especially those who have been historically marginalized. This was demonstrated during my tenure as a health systems leader during the COVID-19 pandemic, on the front lines of health advocacy, and in the ongoing pursuit of cultivating individual and population health literacy."
While Pernell's curriculum vitae does show her residency at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, she describes her time there as including tasks like "facilitat[ing] and manag[ing] short-term public health and preventative medicine projects across multiple sectors," "perform[ing] policy and literature reviews and devis[ing] system-wide and/or program specific change recommendations," and "orchestrat[ing] public health messaging and community engagement campaigns," not treating patients.