Analysis: The vice president claims success tamping down HIV. Now he’s leading Trump’s coronavirus response. We studied what he did as governor, and it’s not encouraging
Gregg S. Gonsalves is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases and Associate Professor of Law at Yale University. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.
On Wednesday February 26, President Trump placed Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the response to the coronavirus outbreak in the United States. The gesture was partly politics—signaling the disease was important enough to require the vice president’s attention—but also built on a claim about Pence’s expertise as the former governor of Indiana.
It’s true that Pence faced an HIV outbreak while he was the governor, and that he eventually allowed a needle exchange. But his revisionist history misrepresents his role in what transpired in the small town of Austin, Indiana five years ago, where over 200 people were infected with HIV. What happened is that Pence failed to act in response to increasingly urgent signs of a significant HIV outbreak, and he delayed implementation of vital public health measures.
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