Parkinson’s expert visited the White House 8 times in 8 months

An expert on Parkinson’s disease from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center visited the White House eight times in eight months from last summer through this spring, including at least once for a meeting with President Joe Biden’s physician, according to official visitor logs.

The expert, Kevin Cannard, is a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders and recently published a paper on Parkinson’s. The logs, released by the White House, document visits from July 2023 through March of this year. More recent visits, if there have been any, would not be released until later under the White House’s voluntary disclosure policy.

It was unclear whether Cannard was at the White House to consult specifically about the president or was there for unrelated meetings. Cannard’s LinkedIn page describes him as “supporting the White House Medical Unit” for more than 12 years. His biography on Doximity, a website for health professionals, lists him as a “neurology consultant to the White House Medical Unit and the physician to the president” from 2012 to 2022, which would include the administrations of Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Records from the Obama administration, when Biden was vice president, show that Cannard made at least 10 visits in 2012 plus a family tour; four in 2013; one in 2014; four in 2015; and eight in 2016. Trump rescinded Obama’s voluntary White House visitors disclosure policy, so records are not available for his four years in office.

Cannard did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The White House would not comment specifically on the purpose of Cannard’s recent visits or whether they were related to the president. “A wide variety of specialists from the Walter Reed system visit the White House complex to treat the thousands of military personnel who work on the grounds,” Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement.

Without discussing Cannard specifically, Bates said that the president “has been seen by a neurologist once a year” as part of his overall annual physical checkup and “that examination has found no sign of Parkinson’s and he is not being treated for it.” He declined to provide dates of any meetings between Biden and any of his specialists but said “there have been no neurologist visits besides the one for his physical per year, three in total” during his 3 1/2 years in office.

At her regular briefing later in the day, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, refused to answer questions about Cannard’s visits, saying she would not discuss specialists who come to the White House out of concern for their “privacy” and “security,” even though Cannard lists his affiliation with the White House on a public website.

Cannard met on Jan. 17 with Kevin O’Connor, the White House physician, as well as John Atwood, a cardiologist at Walter Reed, and another person in the early evening in the White House residence clinic, the logs showed. That meeting came a month before Biden underwent his most recent annual physical checkup at Walter Reed on Feb. 28.

In a six-page letter released after that checkup, O’Connor said the president’s medical team had conducted “an extremely detailed neurologic exam” that had yielded “no findings which would be consistent with” Parkinson’s, stroke or other central neurological disorders. O’Connor did not say whether the examination contained common tests for assessing cognitive decline or detecting signs of dementia that are often recommended for older adults.

The White House has said in recent days that there has been no reason to conduct further examination since February. Questions about Biden’s health, and specifically about Parkinson’s, have proliferated since his disastrous debate performance against Trump on June 27. In interviews with ABC News on Friday and MSNBC on Monday, Biden said he had the equivalent of a neurological exam every day because of the pressure of presidential duties.

The visitor logs, which have also been reported by other news organizations, including The New York Post and The Guardian, indicated that Cannard’s first recorded visit to the White House during the Biden administration was Nov. 15, 2022. The records indicate that he was visiting Joshua Simmons, whose title is not listed.

An array of neurologists who have not personally examined Biden said they observed symptoms in his public appearances that were consistent with Parkinson’s or a related disease, such as hypophonic speech, forward flexed posture, a shuffling gait, masked face and irregular speech pattern.

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