Fake News: Mike Pence blamed for HIV outbreak, again, by Huffington Post
It’s not fake news that a rural county in Indiana suffered through an HIV outbreak. It’s not fake news that then Indiana Gov. Mike Pence cut funding for Planned Parenthood. There are the facts.
It IS FAKE NEWS to connect the dots and blame Pence for the HIV outbreak…again and again.
The Huffington Post qualified the reporting of praise for Pence on HIV but dusting off their 2015 hit piece titled “Indiana Shut Down Its Rural Planned Parenthood Clinics And Got An HIV Outbreak.”
They accurately reported “The Scott County clinic and four other Planned Parenthood facilities in the state, all of which provided HIV testing and information, have shuttered since 2011, in large part due to funding cuts to the state’s public health infrastructure” and “the state is scrambling to erect pop-up clinics to combat an unprecedented HIV epidemic caused by intravenous drug use.”
photo/donkey hotey
Somehow the presence/absence of Planned Parenthood was central to the control of this outbreak.
“In 2005, Planned Parenthood of Indiana received a total of $3.3 million in funding from government contracts and grants. By 2014, that funding had dropped to $1.9 million. Five of Planned Parenthood’s smaller clinics in the state — the health centers in Scottsburg, Madison, Richmond, Bedford and Warsaw — were unable to keep up with the growing technology costs that were necessary to remain competitive as a medical provider. All five clinics that were forced to close had offered HIV testing. None had offered abortions.”
Note the priority of Planned Parenthood: cut funding and cut services for public health NOT the abortion facilities.
The epidemic was announced in March 2015 in Scott County, which normally “would see fewer than five new HIV cases in a year” but “identified 79 confirmed cases of HIV.”
“Scott County is facing an epidemic of HIV, but this is not a Scott County problem; this is an Indiana problem,” said Pence at the time. “The people of Scott County are working hard to address this crisis, and with additional state resources and new tools provided by this emergency declaration, I am confident that together we will stop this HIV outbreak in its tracks.”
An executive order was signed, a needle exchange implemented as assistance was rolled out immediately.
In 2016, Huff Po wrote that “Mike Pence’s Defining Moment As Governor? Enabling An HIV Outbreak” — enabling?
“A timeline of the HIV outbreak, the worst in state history, reads like a roadmap of what to do if you want to create a public health crisis,” they published, still praising the efforts of Planned Parenthood, who turns away 95% of their calls NOT related to abortion.
Note the ignorance of the real cause of the HIV Outbreak: “Authorities say the bulk of the cases are linked through injection drug abuse of the prescription drug, opana, a powerful opioid painkiller containing oxymorphone that is more potent than Oxycontin,” reported Outbreak News Today in their 2015 analysis.
“It’s very concerning to me that most of the individuals who have tested HIV positive have only recently contracted the virus,” said State Health Commissioner Jerome Adams, M.D., M.P.H. “Because prescription drug abuse is at the heart of this outbreak, we are not only working to identify, contact and test individuals who may have been exposed, but also to connect community members to resources for substance abuse treatment and recovery.”
But Pence is still to blame for this drug abuse and HIV outbreak.
“Just goes to show that it pays to do a little research into a politician’s rhetoric before heaping them with compliments,” the Huff PO wrapped up.
Just goes to show how politically biased the liberal media outlet is and an attack on Republicans is more important that the facts of a health crisis. Extrapolating the connection between funding the abortion mill, Planned Parenthood, to an HIV outbreak is bad enough. Blaming Pence is deplorable.
