Coronavirus is big news. So big that it became a topic at the Democrat debate.
Elizabeth Warren took a moment to announce that she will be releasing a plan to deal with the Coronavirus. She didn’t preview exactly what she is going to do to prevent a deadly pandemic, but she made sure everyone knew that her plan included stopping Trump’s wall.
Donald Trump is bungling our response to the coronavirus. We need a real plan to fight back—and I've got one.
Tomorrow, I’m introducing a plan that takes every dime Donald Trump is spending on his racist wall, and diverting it to fighting the coronavirus. #CNNTownHall pic.twitter.com/ZJVfM19uOo
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) February 27, 2020
Clearly, to Warren, ending the wall is more important than controlling the outbreak of a deadly disease.
She also attacked Vice President Pence as “actively disqualified” to manage the Coronavirus taskforce.
This is something that Congresswoman and de facto leader of the House Democrats also did on Twitter.
Mike Pence literally does not believe in science.
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. https://t.co/NhMPOusOWm
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 27, 2020
When someone uses the term “believe in science” you know they are not serious about science. Furthermore, this is clearly anti-Cristian bigotry, which assumes that devout Christianity is incompatible with a scientific approach to technical problem-solving.
As governor, Pence’s science denial contributed to one of the worst HIV outbreaks in Indiana’s history.
He is not a medical doctor. He is not a health expert. He is not qualified nor positioned in any way to protect our public health.
https://t.co/1jVY44p2HF— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 27, 2020
This is from the quoted article from The Verge:
Pence is not a public health expert, either. Instead, as governor of Indiana, he slashed public health spending and delayed the introduction of needle exchanges, which led to the state’s worst outbreak of HIV. He takes over from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar who has been heading the White House coronavirus task force since the beginning of January.
Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, who conducted the research linking the Indiana HIV outbreak to Pence’s policies, tweeted that the decision “speaks to a lack of seriousness by the White House.”
This article links to one from HuffPo:
It’s a shame, since lackluster public health efforts are what led to the defining moment of Pence’s one-term Indiana governorship: a massive HIV outbreak spurred by public health funding cuts and Pence’s moralistic stance against needle exchanges.
Pence first laid the groundwork for Indiana’s HIV outbreak as a congressman back in 2011, when the House passed his amendment to defund Planned Parenthood.
That is Pence’s real crime, defunding Planned Parenthood. What Planned Parenthood has to do with intravenous drug use is neither here nor there. I want to see data that shows that heroin addicts take advantage of PP’s HIV testing services before sharing needles in a drug den before I say this is responsible for anything.
Then in 2013, Pence’s first year as governor of Indiana, Scott County’s one Planned Parenthood closed in the wake of public health spending cuts. Since that particular Planned Parenthood was also the county’s only HIV testing center, there was no longer a place for the county’s 24,000 residents to get tested.
Actually…. the Scottsburg Hospital also did routine HIV testing.
During that time, Pence dragged his feet. Although the outbreak was identified in late January of 2015, it took Pence until April of that year to allow a temporary needle exchange in Scott County. It was a big shift for the governor, who was morally opposed to needle exchanges and believed they promoted drug use.
This position is dead wrong, according to health experts.
“People think that if you give someone a syringe, it means they’re going to go out and inject drugs, and if don’t give them syringes, they won’t inject drugs,” Robert Childs, executive director of the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, told HuffPost in 2015.
“But the thing is that if you don’t give them syringes, they share them, and then people will start getting HIV and viral hepatitis C.”
Needle exchanges as a public good are less science and more an article of faith among the Left.
I will concede that the data shows that needle exchanges do reduce HIV and Hepatitis transmission. But they are not all ice cream and rainbows.
Needle exchange is what these programs are called, but not how they work. Take a look at San Francisco, where 40% of used needles given out are not dropped in public sharps containers. This leads to local news having to print headlines like:
So you saw a needle on the street. What should you do?
People are stepping on needles in the streets, and getting poked with them when they sit on needles stuck in the seats in public transportation. In New York City, needle programs are filling public parks with needles. More than 5,000 found in one week. Kids are finding them in playground sandboxes and under bushes. Free needle programs have been shown to encourage public drug use, addicts admit to it. Addicts flock to cities that provide free needles like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Portland.
Needle exchanges create a black market for clean needles and drugs. It is a manifestation of perverse incentive, the Cobra Effect should be called the clean needle effect. The problems that it causes some cities to reconsider needle exchanges, as they make it harder for very addicted people to get help.
Free needles subsidize drug intravenous drug use, and when you subsidize something, you get more of it.
Lastly, and I am not the only person who wondered about this, why does the Left, which advocates for free needles for drug addicts and complains about the cost of insulin supplies, not have a needle exchange program for poor diabetics?
So while Warren, AOC, and others can criticize Pence and his moralistic stance against needle exchanges, it’s not an unreasonable question to ask:
Are needle exchanges that combat HIV transmission among IV drug users worth the cost of subsidizing addiction, creating public drug injection hangouts, making it easier for drug users to become deep addicts, creating a black market, and, filling streets, public transportation, and parks with dirty needles that expose innocent people to disease a justified cost?
Pence apparently didn’t think so.
Furthermore, this has nothing to do with a response to Coronavirus.
That HIV outbreak was the result of poor people in rural Indiana being addicted to IV opioids and sharing needles. There are a number of reasons for this, including the terrible Obama recovery in rural America, widely available heroin and other opioids from China and Mexico, the destruction of America’s family structure through bad Liberal policies, etc.
This is entirely different from how Coronavirus is spread, which seems to be close proximity human to human communication. This won’t be stopped by providing free needles and decriminalizing shooting up on a BART train.
“Pence didn’t give free needles to addicts to shoot up in a park so he doesn’t believe in science and won’t stop the Coronavirus” is an incredible stretch.
Then there was this:
Coronavirus task force another example of Trump administration's lack of diversity | Analysis https://t.co/bs7L1rUZzc pic.twitter.com/MzzoslqZpT
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) January 30, 2020
The problem CNN has is that there are not enough black, lesbian epidemiologists giving Trump advice.
The Hill defended CNN with a “Republicans Pounce” story.
They just can’t stop.
This is the Left.
“Trump is not taking Coronavirus seriously. Also, the most salient features of our Coronavirus plan is to bankrupt Trump’s border wall and make sure that the Coronavirus advisory committee looks like the United Colors of Benetton. Actual solutions and qualifications are irrelevant.”
I don’t know if Trump’s plan will work or not. I hope it does.
What I do know is that the Left’s plan will fail because to them the biggest threat isn’t the Coronavirus, but breaking articles of Leftist faith while trying to combat the Coronavirus.
Yes Elizabeth let’s have open borders during a pandemic outbreak. That’s a great plan.
OK people Once again for the cheap seats.
Viruses and bacteria do not care about your pigmentation, plumbing,or preferences. Whether you “believe” in science or not, that fact will not change.
However, your belief that a team assembled to propose ways to prevent the spread of a virus MUST have a diversity of pigmentation/plumbing/preferences in order to be effective is the opposite of science.
Remember, these people consider Marxism to be science.
Or economics.
Today’s newsfeeds report that AOC claimed that “Pence doesn’t believe in science”. As if she would know science if it conked her on the head.
My late father, a professor of mechanical engineering (specifically, metrology) used to say “believing you do in church”. That was his way of correcting any student who would start a statement about some aspect of his field with “I believe that…”