Max Gomez, an award-winning medical and science journalist who delivered insightful reports for more than 40 years on TV stations in New York and Philadelphia, most recently during the Covid-19 pandemic, died on September 2 at his home in Manhattan. He is 72.
His partner, Amy Levin, said the cause was head and neck cancer, with which he was diagnosed four years ago.
Billed as “Dr. Max,” he brought a loose gravitas to reporting on topics such as vaccinations, knee replacements, prostate cancer, colonoscopies, sickle cell anemia and, when he contracted them himself, Lyme. disease and MRSA infection. One of his reports on Alzheimer’s disease focuses on his father, a physician, who is deceived as his memory abandons him.
Dr. Gomez has been the chief medical correspondent at WCBS, Channel 2, in New York City since 2007 and made his last appearance there in March 2022. He has also worked at WNBC, Channel 4, and WNEW, Channel 5 (now WNYW), as well as KYW, Channel 3, in Philadelphia.
“What he did best was to care deeply and combine that with the ability to explain complex things so well that regular people could understand them,” said Dan Forman, a former managing editor of the Channel 2 news department, in by phone. “And he will activate it by helping viewers find the help they need.”
Dr. won. Gomez has won seven local Emmy Awards in New York and two in Philadelphia, and some of her work has been seen nationally, on the CBS News program “48 Hours” and on NBC News. He was also a semifinalist in NASA’s journalist-in-space program, which was suspended indefinitely after the shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, and a co-author of three books, among them “Cells Are the New Cure: The Cutting -Edge Medical Breakthroughs. That Are Transforming Our Health” (2017, with Dr. Robin L. Smith).
He has been a regular presence on Channel 2 since the beginning of the pandemic, when there were very few diagnosed cases of Covid in the United States. For two years, as he battled cancer, he explained the medical issues facing viewers; showed how the coronavirus mutates; and sorted by infection data and studies.
He is not a medical doctor – he has a doctorate in neuroscience – and he and the stations where he worked are sometimes criticized for referring to him as Dr. Max Gomez. “Max doesn’t tell people he’s an MD, and neither do we,” Paula Walker, then an assistant news director at Channel 4, told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1991. “In our estimation, it’s probably more he knows more than the average health reporter.”
Maximo Marcelino Gomez III was born on August 9, 1951, in Havana and moved to Miami with his family three years later. His father was an obstetrician and gynecologist; his mother, Concepción (Nespral) Gomez, worked for Cubana Airlines, the national carrier of Cuba, and later for Avianca, the largest airline in Colombia.
After graduating from Princeton University in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in geosciences, Dr. Gomez of Ph.D. in neuroscience from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in 1978. He then became a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in Manhattan.
While studying there, he chose not to pursue a career in research or academia, but instead sought a job in the media that would utilize his scientific background.
“When I first decided to pursue television, it was because I thought that if I didn’t do it, 20 years from now I’d be saying, ‘What if?'” he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 1985.
He added: “Why television? Well, if I said money and ego weren’t a part of it, I’d be lying to you or myself.”
He contacted Mark Monsky, the news director of Channel 5’s “10 O’Clock News”, who gave him a one-month trial in July 1980 that turned into a four-year stay. While there, Dr. Gomez was one of the first television reporters to focus on the AIDS crisis, according to Ms. Levin, who was then a producer at the station.
Dr. Gomez moved to KYW in late 1984 and stayed there for six years. While there, he received an award from United Press International for his AIDS documentary. He later received an award from the New York City health department for his coverage of the 9/11 attacks while working for Channel 4.
“Fear and anxiety levels are out of control in the city, but we spend the first 20 minutes of every broadcast scaring the living daylights out of people,” he said in a 2016 interview for the CaringKind newslettera nonprofit Alzheimer’s care organization, “and then, as my news director said, at the end of the show, I have 90 seconds to talk about them from the sidelines.”
He moved to Channel 2 in 1994 and returned to Channel 4 in 1997 where, after nearly a decade, he was let go as the station cut costs. He returned to Channel 2 in 2007.
In addition to Ms. Levin, left by Dr. Gomez is survived by a daughter, Katie Gomez; a son, Max IV; and a brother, George. His marriage to SuElyn Charnesky ended in divorce.
In an interview with the Philadelphia Daily News in 1985, Dr. Gomez said he took his role seriously: Being on television, he said, gave him credibility and a great responsibility.
“I feel like I owe it to people to be their first filter,” he said. “So if I’m talking about a health remedy, I want to know where this information is published. I present the best product I can. I know it’s scientifically accurate.”
