David Kershenobich, the gastroenterologist who will direct the Ministry of Health with Sheinbaum

MEXICO CITY (apro).-After a career of nearly six decades in the Health sector, including ten years at the head of the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition (INCMNSZ), David Kershenobich Stalnikowitz will assume the Ministry of Health (apro). Ssa) in the incoming government of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo.

At the head of the Ssa, the eminent doctor will supervise the Public Health system, which President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had promised to leave “like that of Denmark”, but which went through serious shortage problems and three profound reorganizations during his six-year term. with the elimination of Seguro Popular, the creation and subsequent disappearance of INSABI, and the recent launch of IMSS-Wellbeing.

At 81 years old, the specialist in liver diseases has navigated all areas of the Health sector, both in academia, where he began as a professor at UNAM in gastroenteorology since 1975 – his resume lists more than 500 publications, eight books and 10 major awards, including the National Science Prize–, as in practice, with his long career at the INCMNSZ, which began in 1986 and culminated with his retirement from the general direction, in 2022.

Along with his extensive and recognized career as a doctor-researcher, Kershenobich also built a solid political career for decades, marked by the presidency of various medical associations in Mexico, and above all by his friendship with Juan Ramón de la Fuente, a man who has all of Sheinbaum’s trust, of whom he will be foreign minister as of next November 1.

After founding the Liver Clinic with De la Fuente in the 1970s, Kershenobich created the Foundation for Liver Health in 1998, again with De La Fuente, who was then Secretary of Health in the government of Ernesto Zedillo. Years later, in 2005, he joined the Board of Governors of UNAM, of which De La Fuente himself was rector.

The doctor from Cijurano, qualified in 1966 after being a student of Salvador Zubirán himself – with whom he had a long friendship -, forged a good relationship with Salomón Chertorivski Woldenberg, Secretary of Health in the government of Felipe Calderón, during which he presided over the National Academy of Medicine. In 2011, after writing a book together, Chertorivksi invited him to take over as board secretary of the General Health Council.

In the last years of his administration at the head of INCMNSZ, which he directed between 2012 and 2022, Kershenobich and his team collaborated closely with the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador – and the capital administration of Sheinbaum – in dealing with the covid-19 pandemic, in the first months of 2020.

At that time, the doctor had been on the advisory board of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) for four years and regularly advised his friend Jorge Alcocer Varela, head of López Obrador’s SSA.

From the first moments of the health crisis, the doctor, the son of two parents of Polish origin, converted the institute under his charge into a hospital dedicated to the care of patients sick with SARS-CoV2, a then little-known pathology that wreaked havoc in the health system.

Kershenobich participated in the coordination to create patient care centers and accommodate health workers, through agreements with hotel chains, to bring medical supplies to Mexico – in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – and for the vast vaccination campaign that was launched in 2021.