Virtual Press Conference,
Fri., August 29, 2025,
6 pm EST,
Registration required & at https://tinyurl/mumia-eyesight.
URGENT MEDICAL ALERT
THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, 2025
Mumia’s eyesight is deteriorating at an alarming rate.
An independent expert ophthalmologist has confirmed the progression of his eye disease by analyzing Mumia’s most recent eye exams. She reports that he needs surgery and medically necessary treatment “immediately” or faces the possibility of “permanent blindness.”
Mumia’s vision has plummeted from 20/30 with glasses in 2024 (near normal) to 20/200 today—legally blind—because the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DOC) failed to adequately monitor his vision and delayed his urgently necessary medical treatment and surgery. The PA DOC has known since at least March of 2025 that Mumia needed eye surgery. Exams from 2024 – 2025 showed a sharp deterioration, demanding immediate intervention. Despite knowing the urgency, they waited until July to act and then pushed surgery off to an unspecified date in September.
Mumia believes he now suffers from “diabetic retinopathy” stemming from a diabetic coma that he endured after being given an improper and unmonitored dose of steroids for a skin disease in 2015. Mumia asserts that the PA DOC is “slow-walking [him] to blindness” in 2025 – another egregious case of the prison’s medical neglect, medical harm, and inability to treat Mumia’s medical needs.
Court records already document this pattern: (a) negligence in monitoring lab reports that led to the diabetic coma, and (b) deliberate denial and delay of his hepatitis C treatment that left him with cirrhosis.
OUR DEMANDS
- Release Mumia now – unconditionally – into the care of his own doctors, family, and friends. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC)has, once again, shown it cannot monitor or provide the timely, corrective care he urgently needs.
- Schedule Mumia’s eye surgery and medically necessary treatment immediately, under the supervision of his independent ophthalmologist, and have it performed by the nearest outside provider approved by that physician.
- Provide Dr. Ricardo Alvarez, Mumia’s chosen physician, with all the medical reports from the prison and any other outside examiners who have seen him in 2025.
Mumia: Institutional Elder Abuse Reports
Introduction to the Strategic Campaign to Report Institutional Elder Abuse, June 2025
by Ricardo Alvarez, MD
“Mumia is alive today because of the public campaigns spearheaded by Pam Africa and also by Noel Hanrahan and Johanna Fernández. But it is the public, the organizers, the citizens nationally and internationally, that have saved Mumia. When I first provided Pam Africa an assessment of Mumia’s health and the damage done to the organ systems in early 2021…
“My training as a trauma-informed medical provider and my professional ethical codes legally require that I report elder abuse when I see it in my office. A physician is part of those diverse professionals, such as mental health workers, social workers, and sometimes teachers and clergy, who all have such legal reporting requirements. Elders are identified as a protected class at the federal, state, and municipal levels.“ Read more.
More reports, a timeline and much more at https://paroleelderabuse.org/mumia-institutional-elder-abuse-reports/.
Mumia’s Eyesight is Endangered! Please Call.
Leave a Reply