Łukasz Szumowski

Łukasz Jan Szumowski (born 3 June 1972 in Warsaw) is a Polish cardiologist and professor of medical sciences. He was minister of health from 9 January 2018, when President Andrzej Duda appointed him in the first cabinet of Mateusz Morawiecki, until a presidential decision of 20 August 2020 removed him from the Council of Ministers and from that office. As a Law and Justice candidate he entered the Sejm for the Płock constituency (district 16) with 35,798 votes, took the oath on 12 November 2019, and gave up the mandate on 2 February 2022.

He studied medicine at the Medical University of Warsaw and then worked at the Institute of Cardiology in Warsaw's Anin district, receiving a doctorate in medical sciences in 2002 and a habilitation in 2010. Duda conferred the title of professor in 2016. Szumowski headed the institute's Clinic of Heart Rhythm Disorders, sat for many years on its scientific council, and is a member of the European Society of Cardiology and the Polish Cardiac Society. From 2011 he led the life-sciences specialist team at the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, and from November 2016 he was an undersecretary of state there.

At the health ministry he succeeded Konstanty Radziwiłł. During the COVID-19 pandemic he was the minister associated with Poland's early health measures, and also with criticism over protective-equipment purchases and over research grants to companies linked to his family. A Centre for Public Opinion Research (CBOS) survey taken from 22 May to 4 June 2020, on a sample of 1,308 adults, found that 53 percent of respondents trusted him and 25 percent did not. His mean score on a scale from −5 to +5 was +1.04, the highest mean among politicians in that wave and down from +1.61 in March, while Duda drew a larger share of trust declarations, 56 percent.

Szumowski denied wrongdoing in the equipment deals and said that, amid the shortage, he would have bought masks "from the devil" because there had been no time to hesitate. In 2025 the Warsaw District Court made final a prosecutors' decision to close the criminal investigation into mask purchases, including an April 2020 contract for about 120,000 masks from China for about 5 million zloty arranged through a ski instructor described as a family friend; the court held that no crime had been shown. The health ministry, by then under another government, had appealed that discontinuation, and a separate inquiry into whether officials abused their powers in pandemic contracts remained open. After leaving the Sejm he directed the National Institute of Cardiology from the start of 2022, having resigned his seat to take the post, until Health Minister Izabela Leszczyna dismissed him on 9 January 2024.

Early life and education

Family background and schooling

Łukasz Jan Szumowski was born on 3 June 1972 in Warsaw, Poland. The Sejm record gives his second name as Jan, the form also used on a roster of his secondary-school class.

A 2020 Newsweek Polska profile, drawing on acquaintances, described his mother as a Polish teacher at a Warsaw secondary school and his father as an engineer. It said both took part in Marriage Encounter, a Catholic movement running retreats for married couples in Poland since the 1970s, and that they attended Mass at the Dominican church in Warsaw’s Służew district. He grew up with a brother, Marcin, four years older, and a sister, Monika. The same profile reported that the brothers belonged to the Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej (Club of Catholic Intelligentsia), and that Szumowski had said in a radio interview that Monika completed a school of artistic weaving.

Both brothers went to the Warsaw secondary school known as Reytan. That name is the familiar form of VI Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. Tadeusza Reytana w Warszawie, which still uses “Reytan” for its alumni. A compiled list of the school’s 1991 matriculation class includes “Szumowski, Łukasz Jan.”

Medical studies

In 1997 he completed medical studies and qualified as a physician (lekarz). The Sejm biography places that qualification at the Faculty of Medicine of the Medical Academy in Warsaw (Akademia Medyczna w Warszawie) and records cardiology in the same entry. A statute of 23 January 2008 renamed the academy the Medical University of Warsaw (Warszawski Uniwersytet Medyczny). Newsweek reported that from his medical studies he belonged to Korporacja Akademicka Arkonia, which presents itself as a non-political student association devoted to friendship, self-improvement and patriotism, and that he later held the senior rank of filister.

After finishing the course he travelled to India with his fiancée, Anna, later his wife. In an interview given to the children’s edition of the Catholic weekly Gość Niedzielny and republished in 2020, he said they had not set out to work there: they hoped, if they reached Kolkata, at least to see Mother Teresa from a distance. Niedziela dates the journey to 1997, immediately after their medical studies, and its profile of him carried a private photograph from that year of the couple as volunteers.

They spent about a month at the first home Mother Teresa had founded, beside the temple of the goddess Kali, a place Szumowski called the “home for the dying.” He told Gość that physicians were scarce among volunteers from many countries, and that the work was washing, feeding, giving water and minor medical procedures amid poverty, hunger and illness. The sisters, the Missionaries of Charity, described it as a life shared with the poorest rather than organised charity; he and Anna also went to morning Mass and evening adoration.

With what money they had left they went to Darjeeling to rest, then returned to Kolkata a day earlier than they had planned. On that evening, he said, they met Mother Teresa again. She wrote a blessing in a medical book they had with them — “If you pray together, you will stay together” — and asked about them and about Poland. They flew back the next day and, on the Saturday after their return, learned that she had died. The weekly’s republication presented them as the last Poles to meet her while she was alive; Niedziela described that as probable rather than certain.

Cardiology and scientific work

Institute of Cardiology

After medical school, Łukasz Szumowski began work at the Institute of Cardiology in Anin, a district of Warsaw, Poland, the hospital that remained the base of his clinical and academic career in cardiology. A Ministry of Health biography states that he received a doctorate in medical sciences in 2002 and a habilitation, the higher postdoctoral degree in the Polish system, in 2010. The same account says that in 2016 he received the title of professor from President Andrzej Duda. The conferral is Presidential Order No. 115.4.2016 of 2 June 2016, published in Monitor Polski on 29 July 2016: dr hab. Łukasz Jan Szumowski is the 22nd name listed for the title of professor of the medical sciences.

By December 2010 he headed the institute's electrophysiology laboratory. The Polish Press Agency, reporting an award that month, wrote that his team performed more than 800 ablations a year and several hundred device implantations. In June 2014 the agency, in a report carried by Rynek Zdrowia, described him as head of the Clinic of Heart Rhythm Disorders (Klinika Zaburzeń Rytmu Serca). He told the agency that ablation was more effective than drugs for atrial fibrillation—about 70–80 percent against 20–40 percent, on his account of the literature—and harder once the arrhythmia was advanced. The 2018 ministry biography states that he directed the clinic and had long sat on the institute's scientific council. An institute page archived in January 2018 lists him as a deputy chair of the council's ninth term, begun on 12 September 2017, with Piotr Pruszczyk as chair and Andrzej Januszewicz and Hanna Szwed as the other deputy chairs.

Electrophysiology, ablation and publications

His early papers concerned atrial fibrillation in Wolff–Parkinson–White syndrome. In 2004 Kardiologia Polska published a study, first-authored by Szumowski with Franciszek Walczak and other institute colleagues, of risk factors for atrial fibrillation in patients who had undergone successful radiofrequency ablation of an accessory pathway. The methods section describes 239 such patients. Patients with atrial fibrillation were older, more often male and more often had a history of syncope; the authors called age, sex and syncope independent risk factors, argued that anterograde conduction over the accessory pathway mattered in the development of atrial fibrillation, and recommended early ablation because procedural risk was small while the chance of atrial fibrillation rose with age. The journal's own page gives the citation as Kardiol Pol 2004;60(3):212–216.

In October 2004 the Journal of the American College of Cardiology published a five-patient series, also first-authored by Szumowski, with Walczak and with coauthors from Michel Haïssaguerre's group in Bordeaux, on mapping and catheter ablation of polymorphic ventricular tachycardia after myocardial infarction. Premature beats that started the arrhythmia arose from the Purkinje network along the scar border; ablation there eliminated them, and none of the five patients had a recurrence over a mean of 16 months. The agency's account of the 2010 award called that procedure, done with Walczak's team, the first ablation of post-infarction polymorphic ventricular tachycardia, and a 2005 ablation of catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia a first as well. The JACC abstract does not itself claim a world first.

In 2010 the Journal of Cardiovascular Electrophysiology published a series led by Szumowski on radiofrequency ablation, with little or no X-ray exposure, in nine pregnant women aged 24 to 34, between 12 and 38 weeks' gestation, who had severe drug-resistant tachyarrhythmias. Three procedures used electroanatomic mapping without fluoroscopy; mean fluoroscopy time for the whole group was 42 seconds, and mean procedure time 56 minutes. The authors reported that the women and fetuses were well afterwards and that, at a mean follow-up of 43 months, the patients were free of arrhythmia, with no ablation-related complications in the mothers or the children. Contemporary reports of the award called him one of the few operators then performing ablation in pregnancy.

A retrospective study in the International Journal of Cardiology in July 2013, with Michał Orczykowski as first author, Walczak among the coauthors and Szumowski as senior author, reviewed 1,007 patients with accessory pathways referred for non-pharmacological treatment. Fifty-six had documented ventricular fibrillation. Overt pre-excitation, male sex and multiple accessory pathways were independent predictors, and age at ventricular fibrillation showed peaks in the second or third decade and in the fifth. A PubMed query for the author name Szumowski L together with an Institute of Cardiology affiliation returned 108 indexed records on 4 November 2026, a count that can include coauthored papers and depends on how affiliations are indexed.

Societies, journals and awards

The ministry biography states that he held numerous positions in European and Polish scientific societies and that he is a member of the European Society of Cardiology and the Polish Cardiac Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Kardiologiczne). An archived page of Heart Beat Journal from January 2018, an English-language periodical on arrhythmia research (eISSN 2543-6333), lists Prof. Lukasz J. Szumowski as editor-in-chief, Marcin Grabowski as executive editor and Maciej Banach, of Łódź, as scientific coordinator. The same page names an international board that included Antonio Bayés de Luna, Pedro Brugada and Maria Trusz-Gluza.

In December 2010 the presidents of the Polish Cardiac Society gave him their annual Presidents' Award, then funded by Bayer and worth 20,000 złoty, at a ceremony in the National Philharmonic in Warsaw held with an analogous gynaecology prize. The agency described a yearly competition for a relatively young physician with significant, sometimes international, success, judged by a chapter of society presidents and vice-presidents and national and regional consultants. Michał Tendera, the chapter's chair, called it the most prestigious distinction in Polish cardiology; that was his remark at the ceremony, not a formal ranking. Szumowski then headed the electrophysiology laboratory; the presidential title of professor came only in 2016.

Science administration

Advisory roles

Szumowski’s first formal role at the Ministry of Science and Higher Education was as an outside assessor of research funding. An ordinance of 15 December 2011 named him chair of the Specialist Team for Life Sciences (Zespół Specjalistyczny Nauk o Życiu) through 31 December 2013. The team covered biological, forestry, medical, physical-culture, Earth, health, agricultural and veterinary sciences, and it reviewed proposals for research potential, restructuring, equipment, young researchers and scientific databases, and how earlier grants had been spent. An ordinance of 31 December 2013 reappointed him chair from 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2015 and added pharmaceutical sciences. The Ministry of Health later stated that from 2011 he had led the ministry’s specialist team for the life sciences.

Undersecretary of state

On 25 November 2016 the ministry announced that Szumowski had been appointed undersecretary of state the previous day, to take the science department previously led by Leszek Sirko. He served under Minister Jarosław Gowin until 9 January 2018, when he became minister of health.

An order of 30 November 2016 gave him the Department of Science: statutory funding, ministerial programmes, scientific cooperation abroad, research investment, the Polish Roadmap for Research Infrastructure, scientific categories, state aid, animals used in research, scholarships and research institutes. He dealt with the Main Council of Research Institutes, the Council of Young Scientists, the Committee for Evaluation of Scientific Units, the Committee for Science Policy and the Polish Academy of Sciences, and he supervised the National Science Centre and, under its founding agreement, the Copernicus Science Centre. The National Centre for Research and Development stayed with Undersecretary Piotr Dardziński, each substituting for the other only when absent, while Secretary of State Aleksander Bobko kept internationalization and the Bureau for Academic Recognition and International Exchange.

Szumowski still spoke for the ministry on the National Agency for Academic Exchange (Narodowa Agencja Wymiany Akademickiej). The Council of Ministers adopted the bill on 9 May 2017 as a third public body, with the two grant-making centres, meant to strengthen science in Poland. The communiqué said that in 2015/16 the ratio of foreign students to inhabitants was 4.07 percent, among the lowest in the OECD, against an average above 8 percent. On 22 June the Sejm education committee recommended the bill. Szumowski met the objection that ministries would hold six of ten council seats by citing seats for the Conference of Rectors and the General Council for Science and Higher Education, opposed a seat for the Academy of Sciences because it could benefit from the programmes, and called a loose foreign-language test for the director “optimal.” The Act of 7 July 2017 made the agency a state legal person seated in Warsaw, responsible for academic exchange, information on Polish higher education and science, and the Polish language abroad; it entered into force on 1 October 2017. Opening Science: Polish Perspectives in Cambridge on 3 November 2017, he described the agency as support for researchers entering and leaving Poland and asked scientists abroad to propose programmes, including incentives to return.

In late December 2017 Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Gowin announced an Institute of Medical Biotechnology that was to put 500 million zlotys into basic research on new drug molecules, not clinical trials, on the model of the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology. In an interview published on 6 January 2018, Szumowski said only three molecules designed in Poland had reached human studies since the Second World War, and that Poland still had no medical-research agency; he argued the gap should be filled within a few years.

The agency was legislated after he moved to the health ministry. On 21 February 2019 the Sejm passed the Medical Research Agency Act by 235 votes to 198, with two abstentions. The ministry presented it as finance for research, especially non-commercial clinical trials, from the budget and from 0.3 percent of National Health Fund revenues, modelled on Western European bodies including the Medical Research Council. The Sejm replaced a six-year ministerial appointment of the president with a competition; opposition deputies argued that shifting Fund money would leave less for patients.

Minister of Health

Appointment and the Sejm

On 9 January 2018 President Andrzej Duda, on a motion from Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, appointed Łukasz Szumowski minister of health in the first cabinet of Mateusz Morawiecki, with effect that day, under Article 161 of the Constitution of Poland. A decree issued the same day removed Konstanty Radziwiłł from the Council of Ministers and from the health portfolio. At the handover in Warsaw, Radziwiłł cited health-needs maps, a halt to hospital commercialization, the hospital network and the statute setting a path toward health spending of 6 percent of GDP; Szumowski said health would remain a government priority.

Szumowski, a cardiologist, stood in the 13 October 2019 parliamentary election as the lead candidate of Law and Justice in Sejm constituency 16, centred on Płock in the Masovian Voivodeship. He received 35,798 votes and took the oath as a deputy on 12 November 2019. On 15 November 2019 Duda appointed the new Council of Ministers, again naming Morawiecki prime minister and Szumowski minister of health, under Articles 154(1) and 147 of the Constitution. The ministry announced the reappointment the same day. He held the post into the COVID-19 pandemic. On 5 June 2020 the Sejm rejected a motion of no confidence in him, 237 votes to 213, short of the statutory majority of 231.

Digital health and the hospital network

The main digitization measure completed before the pandemic was electronic prescribing. A pilot was inaugurated on 25 May 2018 in Siedlce, with Szumowski present; the city's mayor was the first patient to receive an electronic prescription.

Pharmacies were connected to the P1 e-health system by December 2018, and from 1 January 2019 an electronic prescription could be dispensed at any pharmacy in Poland. An act of 19 July 2019 allowed paper prescriptions until 7 January 2020, after which the electronic form was the rule. The ministry reported more than 63 million electronic prescriptions since late May 2018 and more than 60,000 training sessions for doctors and pharmacists. Paper forms stayed available for defined cases, including system outages, and the ministry said the statute set no penalty for a doctor who still used paper after 8 January. At the 8 January 2020 briefing, deputy minister Janusz Cieszyński credited pharmacists and said four e-health bills passed in 2018–19 had been revised in response to the medical professions. Electronic sick notes to the Social Insurance Institution became mandatory on 1 December 2018.

The hospital network was already in place when Szumowski took office. The basic hospital-security system (system podstawowego szpitalnego zabezpieczenia świadczeń opieki zdrowotnej), introduced by an act of 23 March 2017 while Radziwiłł was minister, had been operating since 1 October 2017. Hospitals in the network received a multi-year lump sum from the National Health Fund, intended to cover inpatient care together with related outpatient and rehabilitation services. In an audit published on 19 August 2019, the Supreme Audit Office found that the network had improved neither patients' access nor the finances of most of the 29 hospitals examined. Night and holiday primary care had not shortened emergency-department queues, and some hospitals could not provide the outpatient follow-up the model assumed. In the first three quarters of 2018 those hospitals' revenue was nearly 13 percent higher than a year earlier, but costs rose by more than 17 percent, which the auditors tied partly to statutory pay rises; the Fund had made only one across-the-board tariff increase in the period, of 4 percent in 2017. At the end of September 2018, 23 of the 29 had a negative result. The Office asked the minister to fund costs outside hospitals' control and to link bed use to health-needs maps.

Oncology, financing and workforce

Public health spending was already on a statutory path before Szumowski took office. An act of 24 November 2017 required annual financing of at least 6 percent of GDP, but not before 2025, with interim floors from 4.67 percent of GDP in 2018 to 5.80 percent in 2024. On 8 February 2018 an agreement with resident doctors moved the 6 percent target to 2024 and added higher pay for specialists at a single hospital, higher resident pay for two years' work in Poland after specialization, medical secretaries, and steps against shortages of nurses and doctors. The act of 5 July 2018 set floors of 4.78 percent of GDP in 2018, 4.86 percent in 2019, 5.03 percent in 2020, 5.30 percent in 2021, 5.55 percent in 2022 and 5.80 percent in 2023, then 6 percent from 2024, using the Central Statistical Office GDP notice as of 31 August. A resident who agreed to work the equivalent of two years, within five years of finishing training, for a National Health Fund provider received 700 zł a month extra in a priority specialty or 600 zł otherwise, and the act financed a basic salary of 6,750 zł a month for qualifying full-time specialists.

In oncology the ministry used a regional pilot rather than an immediate nationwide law. A regulation of 13 December 2018 set up coordinated cancer care in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship and the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, with the Lower Silesian Oncology Centre in Wrocław and the Świętokrzyskie Oncology Centre in Kielce as coordinating hubs. It covered patients newly diagnosed with prostate, ovarian, colorectal, breast or lung cancer, and was to run for 18 months after providers signed amended National Health Fund contracts, in order to assess organization, quality and outcomes. A regulation of 2 October 2019 extended the pilot to the Podlaskie Voivodeship and the Pomeranian Voivodeship. The statute establishing a National Oncology Network for the whole country was adopted only on 9 March 2023, after Szumowski had left the ministry.

COVID-19 response

First measures and lockdown

The first laboratory-confirmed case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland was announced by Szumowski on 4 March 2020. The Ministry of Health said the patient, who had arrived from Germany, was in good condition in hospital in Zielona Góra; contacts were in home quarantine, and 584 tests had yielded one positive result. Nine laboratories were already testing for SARS-CoV-2.

Health Minister Łukasz Szumowski at a government press conference during the early weeks of the epidemic in Poland.

A statute of 2 March 2020 on special COVID-19 measures entered into force the day after publication and let voivodes issue immediately binding orders to government and local bodies. On 11 March, after a crisis-team meeting, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said schools, kindergartens and universities would close from 12 to 25 March, with 12–13 March limited to childcare in primary schools and preschools, and that cinemas, museums and other cultural institutions would shut. Szumowski called it a quarantine of society and asked pupils to stay home. On 13 March the government said that from 15 March most foreigners would be barred, returning citizens would face 14 days’ home quarantine, and international passenger flights and trains would stop, with cargo continuing.

The same day Szumowski, under the 2008 infections act, declared a state of epidemic threat from 14 March. From 15 March the regulation suspended cross-border passenger rail and required people entering to go home to give the Border Guard contact details and enter quarantine. It limited dine-in catering (takeaway and delivery excepted), events, culture, sport and recreation, cinemas, bars, tourist lodging and casinos, and capped religious services at 50 people including officiants. On 20 March his further regulation replaced that regime with a state of epidemic until revoked. An amendment of 24 March then prohibited movement from 25 March to 11 April except for work, essential daily needs including health care, unpaid epidemic relief, and worship; people on foot could move only in pairs at least 1.5 metres apart, close relatives excepted, and public transport was limited to half its seats.

Testing, hospitals and restrictions

On 12 March Szumowski said voivodes had been told to convert 19 hospitals into single-purpose infectious hospitals, at least one per voivodeship and more where the population was larger, ready from 16 March, with at least 10 per cent of beds able to provide ventilation. By mid-May the ministry spoke of 21 such hospitals and, in figures given to the Polish Press Agency, said 1,155 beds and 72 ventilators were occupied; on 18 May Silesia had the most patients (239 of 592 places) and Lubusz none. Szumowski said occupancy had never passed 30 per cent and that this showed Poland had avoided “the Italian and French scenario”.

On 4 April the National Health Fund said it would pay for tests for patients and staff of every hospital, not only the designated infectious hospitals; its president, Adam Niedzielski, called that financing change fundamental.

A Council of Ministers regulation of 15 April required, from 16 April until further notice, that mouth and nose be covered on public transport, in cars shared across households, and in public places including streets, workplaces and shops. On 16 April Morawiecki announced staged easing, with later dates to depend on infections, hospital capacity and compliance. From 20 April forests and parks reopened, playgrounds excluded; shop limits rose; religious services were set at one person per 15 square metres; and people over 13 could go out without an adult. He said sharp rises seen in France, Germany, Spain and Italy had been brought under control. Szumowski said easing did not end the epidemic, that masks, disinfection, distance, quarantine and isolation might last a year to two years, and that prolonged total isolation would also cost lives from other diseases because medicine depended on the economy.

A 2022 study using Statistics Poland series estimated about 5,100 excess deaths (2.3 per 10,000) from 2 March to 30 August 2020, against about 2,100 officially recorded COVID-19 deaths in that window, and about 77,500 excess deaths in the next wave, from 31 August 2020 to 7 February 2021. They described that spring toll as low beside later waves and beside Western Europe, and they did not treat it as a count of deaths averted.

The presidential election and public standing

The Marshal of the Sejm had set the presidential election for 10 May 2020. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe later noted that the Constitution of Poland and the Election Code made 17 May the last lawful date, and that postponement required a constitutional state of emergency, such as a state of natural disaster, which was not declared. On 17 April Szumowski told Morawiecki that conventional voting would be medically safe only in about two years, once a vaccine existed, and that postal voting was the only method he could recommend.

A bill introduced on 6 April would have made the 10 May election postal only, allowed the Marshal to move the date during a state of epidemic, and shifted some duties of the National Electoral Commission to the Ministry of State Assets. The opposition criticised both holding the vote and the all-postal bill, which took effect on 9 May. On 6 May the leaders of Law and Justice and Jarosław Gowin’s Agreement said they favoured rescheduling. On 10 May the commission resolved that no ballots could be cast, so the election had not taken place. A law of 2 June added optional postal voting to polling-station voting, and on 3 June the Marshal set 28 June, with a possible second round on 12 July. ODIHR described the gap as legal limbo and said a date outside the constitutional window conflicted with paragraph 5.3 of the 1990 Copenhagen Document. Turnout was 64.5 per cent and then 68.2 per cent; Andrzej Duda won with 51.03 per cent to 48.97 per cent for Rafał Trzaskowski.

In a CBOS survey of 1,308 adults from 22 May to 4 June, 53 per cent trusted Szumowski and 25 per cent did not. Among people who recognised and rated him, the mean on a scale from −5 to +5 was +1.04, the highest that wave, down from +1.61 in March; Duda’s trust share was slightly higher, at 56 per cent, and Morawiecki’s was 54 per cent. Trust had risen 7 points since March, but distrust had risen 14, which CBOS tied to the pandemic and to opposition claims of a conflict of interest and family business ties, a separate controversy from the sanitary rules. In the next wave, 15–25 June (n = 1,378), trust was 49 per cent, down 4 points, and distrust 31 per cent, up 6; the mean fell from +1.04 to +0.66, a change CBOS marked as statistically significant.

Procurement and conflicts of interest

Protective-equipment purchases

In April 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic in Poland, the health ministry bought masks through a ski instructor who knew Szumowski's brother Marcin, a healthcare businessman. POLITICO, citing Gazeta Wyborcza, reported about 5 million złoty for 120,000 FFP2 masks at 39 złoty, against about 4 złoty retail, and 20,000 surgical masks at 8 złoty, about eight times retail, and said the goods later failed safety standards. Szumowski denied cronyism, saying he would have "bought masks from the devil" because "there was no time to think." The ministry said it would "claim every zloty spent for equipment that turned out to be defective." Later accounts of the criminal file described about 120,000 masks from China for about 5 million złoty, with critics citing about 45 złoty a mask against a market price under 1 złoty.

The Warsaw District Prosecutor's Office also examined money laundering, a resale to a state company and allegedly false certificates. In February 2025 it found no offence: the importers had relied on a Chinese certificate, the masks met basic protection and were no threat to health, and the supposed European certificate was an unissued draft, so there was no intent to mislead. The health ministry, by then under a Civic Coalition-led government, appealed. On 27 June 2025 the Warsaw Regional Court upheld the discontinuation in a final ruling, for lack of new evidence, while leaving civil claims and a reopening on new evidence possible. Law and Justice figures Piotr Müller and Janusz Cieszyński called the result a vindication. It did not erase the 2020 reports that the masks had failed the standards then cited.

A wider buying programme ran in parallel. In March 2024 the Supreme Audit Office found that the prime minister's chancellery had spent nearly 200 million złoty in 2020–2021 on masks, coveralls and face shields uneconomically, after Mateusz Morawiecki directed KGHM Polska Miedź, Grupa Lotos and the Industrial Development Agency to buy them. The health ministry did not select those contractors. Checks challenged about 41.7 percent of the masks, 46.6 percent of the coveralls and 86 percent of the face shields from the KGHM and Lotos channel, and NIK notified prosecutors.

Ventilator contracts

On 14 April 2020 the health minister, for the State Treasury, signed framework agreement AD.252.9.2020 with E&K Sp. z o.o. of Lublin under the COVID-19 statute, outside public-procurement law. The same day the firm offered 1,241 ventilators for 44.4 million euro (about 204 million złoty). The ministry paid an unsecured advance of 35.1 million euro (about 161 million złoty). NIK recorded that undersecretary Janusz Cieszyński approved the prepayment, telling auditors that delay might lose the offer, that the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau had checked the offer positively, and that the Foreign Intelligence Agency had listed the supplier for state companies.

It accepted 200 ventilators and not the other 1,041, and withdrew from the orders in May and June 2020. By 29 June E&K had repaid 63.9 million złoty and supplied goods worth 39.7 million złoty; about 55 million złoty of the advance was still out at year-end. NIK found the advance inconsistent with budgetary rules, the "invoice original" not a VAT invoice, and uneconomical spending from the missing security of 30.4 million złoty. The ministry said speed had required the purchase and that recovery was under way. A payment order of 16 November 2020 awarded the State 12,013,330.87 euro plus interest; by 2026 about 7.4 million euro of principal had been enforced and about 4.6 million euro remained.

Research grants and family companies

Separately, POLITICO reported that the National Centre for Research and Development had awarded about 300 million złoty to OncoArendi Therapeutics, run by Marcin Szumowski, and that the minister's wife was an indirect stakeholder. Science minister Wojciech Murdzek's table of 26 May 2020 lists eleven awards from 2012 to February 2020 totalling about 187.3 million złoty. Only one, 29.6 million złoty on 20 October 2017, fell while he was a science undersecretary. Murdzek said Szumowski had not supervised the centre and could not decide competitions; seven decisions, he wrote, dated from the previous government. Another 22.3 million złoty was awarded on 14 February 2020, after Szumowski became health minister.

POLITICO also reported that Life Science Innovations, in which Łukasz Szumowski had been a shareholder and in which his wife was described as a stakeholder, lost a competition for 24 million złoty, appealed, and received the grant after his appointment as deputy science minister in late 2016. The centre's page records 24 million złoty of support for the fund. On 24 May 2020 Szumowski said, "I never oversaw the NCBR," and linked the claims to the election. The ministry said he had disclosed the conflict and would not supervise the centre; his brother called the reports "untrue." Civic Coalition MPs Dariusz Joński and Michał Szczerba treated the sequence as an unresolved conflict of interest.

Audits, prosecutors and courts

NIK's review of 2020 budget part 46 (Health), P/21/001, was descriptive, not positive: it faulted the unsecured advance and slow recovery, rated the accounts positively, and asked for emergency spending rules. On the night of 4–5 June 2020 the Sejm rejected a Civic Coalition motion of no confidence in Szumowski, 237 votes to 213.

On 21 June 2021 the Warsaw District Prosecutor's Office discontinued an abuse-of-powers inquiry covering E&K. Spokeswoman Aleksandra Skrzyniarz said on 5 July that nothing at signing had cast doubt on the supplier, that the ministry withdrew and sought repayment after the short delivery, and that officials had bargained the mask price down under a regulation of 20 March 2020. The decision also found no offence in the order that KGHM buy protective equipment. Alleged disadvantageous disposal and forged certificates stayed in another case. On 16 May 2024 prosecutors reopened the inquiry for 6 April–14 August 2020. Szczerba said it concerned abuse of powers over a partial delivery without required documents. That step was not a charge, and no conviction of Szumowski on the file had been reported by the later civil judgment.

The June 2025 ruling closed the mask investigation without charges. Wirtualna Polska reported that the Łódź regional prosecutor's office and the Internal Security Agency were still examining whether officials exceeded their powers in contracts with non-compliant suppliers, including steps by the Government Strategic Reserves Agency. On 17 July 2026 the Warsaw Regional Court ordered E&K to pay the Treasury 3,641,140 euro in penalties plus interest. The solicitors' office said the firm, in liquidation and without assets after owner Andrzej Izdebski's death, was unlikely to pay.

Resignation and later offices

Departure from the ministry

On 18 August 2020, at a press conference in Warsaw, Łukasz Szumowski said that he was resigning as minister of health. He told reporters that he would remain a deputy in the Sejm, stay in public life, and return to clinical work, including at the Institute of Cardiology, where he wanted to treat patients again. He said the departure had been intended for the beginning of 2020 and had been put off because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that neither Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki nor Law and Justice leader Jarosław Kaczyński had urged him to leave.

The announcement came a day after deputy health minister Janusz Cieszyński said that he was leaving the ministry. On the morning of 18 August, Civic Coalition deputies Michał Szczerba and Dariusz Joński, speaking outside the ministry, said that Cieszyński's exit was not enough. They called for Szumowski's resignation and for information on transactions through the ministry's bank account, citing objections to purchases of coronavirus tests, protective masks and ventilators. A ministry spokesman described the briefing as an attempt to attract media attention. Szumowski said that the resignation had "nothing in common with any investigations under way," that the purchases had been explained transparently, and that linking the two was "an excessive interpretation."

Andrzej Duda, on the prime minister's motion and under Article 161 of the Constitution, dismissed Szumowski from the Council of Ministers and from the office of minister of health by a decision of 20 August 2020, published in Monitor Polski on 26 August. The same day Morawiecki named Adam Niedzielski, an economist who had been president of the National Health Fund since October 2019, to succeed him. Duda formally appointed Niedzielski minister of health on 26 August 2020.

Parliament and the institute directorship

Szumowski remained the Law and Justice deputy for the Płock constituency. On 28 January 2022 the health ministry said that Tomasz Hryniewiecki, director of the National Institute of Cardiology named for Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, in Warsaw's Anin district, would become the minister's plenipotentiary for a national cardiovascular-disease programme for 2022–2032, and that Szumowski would succeed him as director. Szumowski had worked at the institute for about 20 years and headed its centre for heart-rhythm disorders.

Entrance of the National Institute of Cardiology in Warsaw's Anin district, with the institute's name beside the door.

He gave up the parliamentary seat in order to take the directorship. He said that running the institute, treating patients and sitting effectively as a deputy could not be combined, and that statute also forbade it. Elżbieta Witek, marshal of the Sejm, recorded that the mandate expired at the end of 1 February 2022 because he had renounced it. On 8 February Rafał Romanowski, then a deputy agriculture minister and the next candidate on the same Law and Justice list, took the oath in his place.

Dismissal in 2024 and subsequent clinical role

On 13 December 2023 President Duda appointed Donald Tusk prime minister and swore in a new Council of Ministers, with Izabela Leszczyna as minister of health. On 9 January 2024 Leszczyna dismissed Szumowski as director of the institute. The institute stated that from that date he no longer held the post and that, until a successor was named, the deputy directors would manage it within their competences. He was removed at the same time from the council of the Medical Research Agency. In early December Leszczyna had already dismissed Radosław Sierpiński, whom Rzeczpospolita described as a close associate of Szumowski, as the agency's president; the paper reported that the Supreme Audit Office had confirmed irregularities in the agency.

Szumowski told the Polish Press Agency that he remained head of his clinic and formally at the institute, only no longer its director, and that he might as well concentrate on treating people rather than on administration. He questioned the point of removing him when no successor, and not even an acting director, had been appointed. On 15 January 2024 Leszczyna named the cardiologist Janina Stępińska, who had created the institute's cardiac intensive-care clinic and led it until 2019, as director.

Personal life and civic positions

Family

Szumowski married Anna Szumowska in 1997. They met while studying medicine at the Medical Academy in Warsaw, now the Medical University of Warsaw. She later practised as an anaesthesiologist and established a children's pain clinic at the Children's Memorial Health Institute. They have four children: sons Jan, Stanisław and Stefan, and a daughter, Maria, a fact also recorded in the Ministry of Health notice of his January 2018 appointment.

His brother, Marcin Szumowski, is a biotechnology executive who from 2012 was a co-founder and president of the management board of OncoArendi Therapeutics, a firm developing drugs for cancer and respiratory disease.

Religious, charitable and professional associations

Szumowski belongs to the Związek Polskich Kawalerów Maltańskich, the Polish association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Its president, Jerzy Baehr, confirmed the membership on 31 May 2020, after posters used a photograph of Szumowski in the order's traditional dress, the culla.

In 2014 he signed the Declaration of Faith of Catholic doctors and medical students on human sexuality and fertility (Deklaracja wiary lekarzy katolickich i studentów medycyny w przedmiocie płciowości i płodności ludzkiej). Initiated by Wanda Półtawska, the text was cut in stone and left that year at Jasna Góra Monastery during a health-workers' pilgrimage, as a votive gift for the canonisation of Pope John Paul II. Rzeczpospolita reported nearly 4,000 signatories, including 59 professors. It places divine law above human law and states that conception and death depend on God alone, naming abortion, contraception, artificial fertilisation, euthanasia and in vitro fertilisation among decisions it says a person may not take. It treats sex as biologically determined, reserves parenthood in its account to sacramental marriage, and claims a Catholic doctor's right to follow a conscience formed by Church teaching, including refusal of incompatible acts, without imposing that view on others.

In January 2018 he told the Polish Press Agency that he had signed because he regarded a conscience clause as part of the legal order, a view he said the full bench of the Constitutional Tribunal had upheld in 2015. Financing in vitro fertilisation and changing the abortion statute were not his priority, he said, and as minister he would apply the law parliament had passed.

On 26 May 2019 he joined the 95th national pilgrimage of health workers to Jasna Góra, attended by about 5,000 people, including Senate marshal Stanisław Karczewski. He called the work a mission and said believers should see each patient in the Gospel's "least of these". Those present recited an act entrusting the Polish health service to Mary.

Before entering the cabinet he had worked with the foundation Kresy w Potrzebie – Polacy Polakom, aiding Polish citizens beyond Poland's eastern border, especially children in Grodno and Wołkowysk, and with the Serce dla Arytmii foundation and patient association on arrhythmia prevention, diagnosis and treatment. In January 2018 Wirtualna Polska identified him as a filister of the academic corporation Arkonia, described from the corporation's own materials as an apolitical student association devoted to friendship, self-cultivation and patriotism, with the motto Veritate ac labore.

On 31 May 2023 health minister Adam Niedzielski, on a motion from the president of the Medical Research Agency, appointed him to the Supreme Bioethics Committee for Clinical Trials (Naczelna Komisja Bioetyczna), charged with ethical review of clinical trials of medicinal products and with training and listing local bioethics committees. On 15 November 2023 education and science minister Przemysław Czarnek awarded him, then director of the National Institute of Cardiology, the Gold Medal "Zasłużony dla Nauki Polskiej Sapientia et Veritas" for distinguished service to higher education and science.