As an aspiring US congressman, US Vice President Mike Pence once claimed that “smoking doesn’t kill,” while as governor of Indiana, he faced heavy criticism for his handling of what turned into the worst HIV crisis in the state’s history.
This track record illicited immediate outrage from health specialists when US President Donald Trump on Wednesday appointed Pence to lead the US response to COVID-19.
Those who have witnessed Pence make a series of what they see as ill-informed public health decisions throughout his political career have said that he is a dangerous choice.
“We have the greatest experts — really in the world — right here,” Trump said at a news conference at the White House on Wednesday, as he addressed the virus crisis following days of criticism about his government’s sluggish response to warnings from his own federal agency that it is a case of when and not if there will be community spread in the US.
From those experts, Trump then plucked Pence.
“We have no higher priority than the safety, security and health of the American people,” Pence told the media.
However, experts have said that Pence’s very appointment flies in the face of his own statement.
“[Trump] made the choice of putting someone absolutely not up to the task to this crucial position,” Yale University epidemiology professor Gregg Gonsalves said on Twitter. “It’s like putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department, a bank robber in charge of the US Mint.”
As governor of Indiana, Pence oversaw one of worst HIV outbreaks in the state’s history in 2015. Pence’s response was widely criticized as inadequate and ill-informed.
When HIV badly hit southern Indiana, health workers found their efforts hampered by a woeful lack of public health staffing. Pence had slashed public health funding after assuming office.
An attempt to introduce needle-exchange programs, which were seen as key to combatting the HIV crisis, was thwarted by Pence’s resistance to those efforts.
In April 2015, Pence finally allowed a needle-exchange program, three months after the outbreak began, but only for 30 days.
Pence, an ardent evangelical who regularly introduces himself in speeches as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican — in that order,” has a troubling record on HIV that goes back even further.
As a US congressman, Pence supported a controversial plank of then US President George W. Bush’s global AIDS program, which stipulated that 33 percent of funds must be spent on efforts to promote sexual abstinence and strict heterosexual monogamy.
“The timeless values of abstinence and marital faithfulness before condom distribution are the cure for what ails the families of Africa,” Pence told the US Congress in 2003.
On Thursday, US Democrats scrambled to respond to Pence’s new assignment.
US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a first-term progressive congresswoman with a nationwide following, summed up the feelings of many Trump opponents.
“Mike Pence literally does not believe in science,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It is utterly irresponsible to put him in charge of US coronavirus response as the world sits on the cusp of a pandemic. This decision could cost people their lives. Pence’s past decisions already have.”
With Pence in charge of the medical response, Americans are anxiously awaiting answers, but his track record is giving pause.
“Time for a quick reality check,” Pence posted online in 2000, the year he was elected to the US House of Representatives. “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.”
Scientists have long concluded that exactly the opposite is true.
When Pence became governor in 2013, he slashed funding for programs designed to prevent smoking and help people quit.
As of 2018, Indiana had the eighth-highest rate of cigarette smokers in the US.
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