Juan Luis Steegmann Olmedillas

Juan Luis Steegmann Olmedillas
Born (1955-07-08) 8 July 1955
Madrid, Spain
OccupationsHematologist, researcher, politician
Known forChronic myeloid leukemia research; Member of the Congress of Deputies (2019–2023)

Juan Luis Steegmann (born 8 July, 1955 in Madrid[1]), is a Spanish scientist and doctor who has been a director of the European LeukemiaNet research group and the GELMC group of the Spanish Society of Hematology.

He is also a politician and represented the Vox party in the Congress of Deputies from 2019 to 2023.

His paternal ancestors are German, English and Spanish (Mannheim until the XIX century, Nottingham and Jerez in the XIX-XX); his maternal ancestors were from Segovia, a province north of Madrid. His paternal grandfather went bankrupt and Steegmann was born into a working-class family. His father was an artistic locksmith, and his mother a dressmaker. He is married to a doctor, and they have a daughter.

Academic studies

Steegmann studied with scholarships at a catholic school (Caldeiro Foundation). In 1978 he obtained a degree in Medicine and Surgery from the Complutense University of Madrid. He was a student with splendid grades. He has said in interviews that it was partly to keep the scholarships he enjoyed. He obtained a position as a resident physician in Hematology at the Hospital Ramón y Cajal a few months after finishing his degree. He finished his residency in 1982, and, after four years in the Ävila and Móstoles Hospitals, in 1987 he started as an consultant in Hematology at the Hospital de la Princesa in Madrid. He complemented his training with stays at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX, and in Besançon (France). In 1998 he obtained his Doctor of Medicine degree from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), with a thesis entitled “Treatment with Interferon alfa in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia”, qualified with summa cum laude.

Although he was a professor for twenty years at UAM, he did not become a full professor. However, from 2010 to 2019, he was professor of visiting foreign hematologists in the “Emerging Regions Support and Partnership Preceptorship Program” of the International CML Foundation. He has been Head of the Advanced Therapies in Oncohematology Group at the Instituto de Investigación del Hospital de la Princesa ( IIS-IP), since the creation of IIS-IP, until he retired in 2023.

Professional Curriculum.

  • Member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish Society of Hematology and Hemotherapy (2002-2006).
  • Coordinator of the CML Group of the Madrid Association of Hematology and Hemotherapy, from 2009 to 2019.
  • President of the Spanish CML Registry from 2000 to 2017.
  • President of the Spanish CML Group of the Spanish Society of Hematology and Hemotherapy, from 2010 to October 2021.
  • President of the Spanish Foundation for the Cure of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, of which he is founder, from 2017 to the present.

Research

He has been principal investigator in ten competitive projects with Spanish or European public entities. Principal investigator in 51 clinical trials with private or public entities. He is member of the European Investigators Group on CML (EICML) and the European LeukemiaNet.

Publications

His research has focused mainly on chronic myeloid leukemia, hemopoietic growth factors, and hemopoietic transplantation. He has published six manuals on the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia, and has been editor of three of them, the last one published in 2020.

He has 181 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, 117 according to PubMed.

The most relevant or with the highest impact are the following:

Political life.

Off-time politician

Steegmann said in an interview to Libertad Digital that in the years 1974-1978 he was a “Marxist and fellow traveler” of the Communist Party of Spain. He was a students delegate in college, under the guidance of his mentor at the time, also a doctor, Lola Ruiz. From 1996 to 2004 he was a member of the PSOE. He never held political posts, except as an unpaid advisor, apparently close to Juan Manuel Freire, who later became the Health Counselor of the Basque Country. Since he left the PSOE, he is not known to be politically active until 2019.

A fortuitous meeting with Abascal made him a member of parliament.

In 2016 he met Santiago Abascal, president of the far-right VOX party, in a cafeteria near the Hospital de la Princesa. They struck up a friendship, and Steegmann became affiliated to the party in 2017. In 2019, Abascal puts him at number six on the lists of VOX to the Congress of Deputies for Madrid. In April 2019, VOX got 24 seats, and Steegmann was not among them. However, the riots in Catalonia in October 2019 propelled VOX in the November 2019 elections: VOX obtained 52 deputies, seven in Madrid, and Steegmann got his seat.

Work as a Member of Congress

Steegmann was appointed Parliamentary Group Spokesman on Health, and from there he became the scourge of the Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, and his assistant, the doctor Fernando Simón. Steegmann warned since January 2020 of the seriousness of the COVID epidemic, to the skepticism of all, and then proposed to prevent the arrival of flights from China. His attacks on the minister were relentless, although keeping the forms and with a certain humor that oscillated between typical English irony and Spanish promptness.

Although the congressional website states that he had 596 oral interventions, we have been able to verify that there were 160 in Commission and 19 in Plenary, which made him one of the most active parliamentarians, since the Health Commission was the only one that met weekly during the State of Alarm. He was the author of 200 legislative proposals and more than 3,000 questions. COVID-19 was the core of his activity, and his proposals covered diagnosis, statistics, monitoring, physical prevention, treatments, and above all, vaccines. His opposition to the legalization of marijuana was fundamental to the fact that it is still pending. His defense of vaccines against COVID-19 was firm and continued until the end of his career as a congressman, and he did it against an important sector of the ultra-right, both outside his party and within it.

Steegmann under attack

Despite his opposition to compulsory vaccination, the COVID passport, and the vaccination of children under 12, he was falsely accused of the opposite. The zenith of the accusations came in September 2021, when influential people in social networks accused him of being paid by several pharmaceutical laboratories to defend vaccines, a claim that was denied by Steegmann and by the party itself, which threatened to sue. According to maldita.es, the accusation was not true. The same was affirmed by the website outono.net. Steegmann continued to receive serious insults on the net, which worsened when, on September 17, 2021, in an interview on esRadio, Santiago Abascal refused to reveal whether he had been vaccinated. Shortly after, in an interview on the same chain, Abascal said that “Vox for many months has been asking for an acceleration of the arrival of vaccines and has asked that all Spaniards who wanted access to them could do so.” However, the damage was done, and even though Steegmann was a member of the National Executive Committee, or perhaps because of it, Abascal's ambiguity gave wings to the anti-vaccine sector of his party, and the criticisms, often furious and violent, continued to be directed at Steegmann. He did not cease in his defense of vaccines and his tweets were firm in that sense, although they were often arrogant in the face of those who were simply vaccine skeptics. However, it must be recognized that thanks to his obstinacy, the far-right party continued to present proposals to promote vaccination, and even, as the Congress website reveals, was more active than the Popular and Ciudadanos parliamentary groups.

Resignation from Congress and separation from VOX.

In the July 2023 elections, VOX only obtained five deputies for Madrid, so Steegmann was not elected. Although the surprising resignation of Iván Espinosa de los Monteros gave him the opportunity to be a deputy again, Steegmann decided not to pick up his deputy's seat and resigned from his position as Vocal of the National Committee of the party. In his farewell letter, he was grateful to Abascal, and said that “the Vox parliamentary group begins a new journey” and “others should be on board”. His separation from the political project of VOX culminated in May 2024, when he criticized the contents of the speeches of the European far-right summit “Viva 24”. In his letter he wrote that “Distributionism, statehood and neo-falangism ( a mild form of fascism) go against the founding basis of VOX” and criticized the antiscientific drift exemplified in the speech given by VOX MEP Jorge Buxadé, who had mentioned vaccines in a pejorative way. Steegmann threw a dart saying “there are too many voices in VOX who boast of ‘antivaccination’ in public and who have been vaccinated in private”.

Thus ended the political career in VOX of the one who was called “El medico de VOX (“Doctor of VOX”). The anti-vaccinationists of the far-right party had achieved their goal: his seat in the Health Commission was filled by a deputy whose last job before politics was as an ambulance driver.

Steegmann continues to publish on leukemia, on COVID-19, and on the anti-vaccine movement. He remains actively involved in the Foundation he chairs, and in the European Leukemia Network, at whose February 2025 congress he gave a Keynote Lecture on the relationship of science, medicine and politics.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.