Is Mitch McConnell a Poster Child for Healthcare-Associated Infections?

As I write this, I have no idea if Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old U.S. Senator from Kentucky, is alive or dead. On July 12, McConnell released a photo of himself and his wife and said he was alive. According to an article in the Washington Post, McConnell said he was in the hospital after a nasty fall and was still in the hospital after he contracted pneumonia.

As the country debates McConnell’s health status, the bigger story to me is why he’s still in the hospital, assuming the reason is correct. McConnell may be the victim of a healthcare-associated infection, or HAI. He said he got pneumonia when he was in the hospital.

As a former patient safety reporter, my two questions:

• How did McConnell contract pneumonia in the hospital?
• Was McConnell vaccinated against the respiratory disease as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends for adults 65 and older?

I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I do know that pneumonia is making a comeback in the U.S. for unknown reasons. One reason might be people McConnell’s age not getting a safe and effective pneumonia vaccine because people like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC, tell gullible people, without proof, that vaccines are unsafe and ineffective.

In a recent blog post, “Death Takes a Working Vacation in the U.S.,” I noted that flu and pneumonia were the eighth-leading causes of death in the U.S. last year, with 56,511 people dying from those diseases. In 2024, they were No. 11 with 48,139 deaths. It’s not a coincidence that proven safe and effective vaccines can prevent or minimize the severity of the flu and pneumonia. That is, if you ignore the conspiracy- and dogma-driven anti-vax drivel from RFK Jr. and get yourself immunized.

A new study out in the New England Journal of Medicine shows why it’s important to get a pneumonia vaccine, especially if you’re old like McConnell. Hospitals don’t do a particularly good job preventing you from getting pneumonia when you’re lying in a hospital bed.

The study, done by CDC researchers, looked at the prevalence of HAIs in hospitals in 2023 compared with the rate of HAIs in 2015 and 2011. The HAIs included pneumonia, gastrointestinal infections, surgical-site infections, bloodstream infections and urinary tract infections. The study found that the rate of HAIs in hospitals dropped to one in 38 patients in 2023 from one in 31 patients in 2015 and one in 25 patients in 2011. That’s the good news.

The bad news is not much changed for pneumonia. In the study pool for 2023, 355 hospitalized patients got 390 infections. (One patient can get more than one type of infection.) Of the 390 infections that year, 102, or 26.2% were pneumonia. Of the 427 infections in the 2015 study pool, 110, or 25.8% were cough and pneumonia.

And before you scream “but the ventilators,” most pneumonia infections in either year were not ventilator-associated infections. Those represented just 34.3% of cases in 2023 and 35.5% of cases in 2015. In other words, something other than ventilators caused patients to get viral or bacterial pneumonia infections. A fact not lost on the researchers.

“Pneumonia has remained the most common healthcare-associated infection,” the researchers said. “Current guidelines include evidence-based practices to prevent pneumonia in hospitalized patients, but there is a continued need to identify and implement effective prevention strategies, particularly among patients not receiving mechanical ventilation.”

That’s a nice way of saying hospitals over the past two decades have done a lousy job preventing their patients from getting pneumonia, even when those patients are not on a ventilator.

Poor Mitch McConnell. Who knew he’d become an anecdote in this blog post about patient safety?