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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was hospitalized on Jan. 1 after complications from a procedure 10 days earlier, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center officials said Tuesday.
NBC News has reported that Austin’s hospitalization was not disclosed to the White House until three days after he arrived at the hospital, causing criticism amid the rising tensions in the Middle East.
In a statement, Walter Reed officials said Austin had been diagnosed with cancer in early December and was admitted to the military hospital on Dec. 22 for a prostatectomy, a minimally invasive surgical procedure to remove all or part of the prostate gland. He went under general anesthesia and returned home the next morning.
Austin was readmitted to the hospital in suburban Maryland on New Year’s Day with nausea and severe pain. Doctors determined that he had a urinary tract infection, and he was transferred to the intensive care unit the next day, the hospital said in its statement.
Doctors said in the statement that the defense secretary’s progress has been steady and that his infection has cleared, adding: “During this stay, Secretary Austin never lost consciousness and never underwent general anesthesia.”
On Tuesday, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters at a briefing that President Joe Biden had learned of Austin’s cancer diagnosis earlier that day.
In a letter Friday to top Defense Department officials, the Pentagon Press Association called the lack of transparency an “outrage” and added:
At a time when there are growing threats to U.S. military service members in the Middle East and the U.S. is playing key national security roles in the wars in Israel and Ukraine, it is particularly critical for the American public to be informed about the health status and decision-making ability of its top defense leader.
In his own statement Saturday, Austin said he took full responsibility “for my decisions about disclosure.”
“I am very glad to be on the mend and look forward to returning to the Pentagon soon,” he said. “I also understand the media concerns about transparency and I recognize I could have done a better job ensuring the public was appropriately informed. I commit to doing better.”
Kirby said Tuesday that Biden had “complete confidence” in Austin, but acknowledged that it was “not optimal for a situation like this to go as long as it did without the commander in chief knowing about it.”