On March 26, the United States surpassed global numbers of COVID-19 cases, taking the lead from China, Italy, and Spain. While the U.S. government is finally ramping up testing, state and local governments are tightening up restrictions on social distancing and shelter in place order. Criticism remains in the Trump administration’s early handling of this global pandemic. The selection of Vice President Mike Pence as head of the United States’ COVID-19 task force was an action deemed particularly troubling by many.
Pence was appointed to this position of leadership in late February. The former Indiana Governor’s widely critiqued history of anti-science beliefs and policies has made many question his fitness to serve as head of the nation’s response to this increasingly dire threat. Throughout Pence’s career, a number of his claims have turned heads- ranging from bizarre to downright dangerous.
In 2000, when Pence was running for Congress, he wrote an op-ed that advocated against government regulation of the tobacco industry. “Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill,” he boldly stated in the article published on his old campaign website. Without citing a single source, he went on to state that nine out of ten smokers do not develop lung cancer and two out of three smokers do not die from smoking-related illnesses. The Center for Disease Control states that smoking tobacco is the “leading cause of preventable death” in the United States.
Pence has always been outspoken in his denial of climate change science, stating that “global warming is a myth” and that CO2 emissions cannot cause changes to the Earth’s atmosphere in another op-ed published on his website. In 2002, he delivered a speech before Congress advocating against the teaching of evolution as scientific fact in public schools despite the fact that the overwhelming scientific consensus embraces evolutionary biology.
Pence has also called for funding of institutions that “provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior”- a statement that, given his anti-LGBTQ political history, many believe is a euphemism for promoting gay conversion therapy.
Perhaps the most notorious moment of Pence’s career comes, ironically, from his heavily criticized response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic during his time as Indiana Governor. A small town called Austin, Indiana faced over 200 cases of HIV. In November 2014 local health authorities recognized that the situation needed rapid assistance, but it was not until March 2015 that Pence declared a public health emergency.
Despite a push from state legislators and health officials to establish a clean needle exchange program to prevent syringe sharing in the community, Pence initially resisted these measures as a social conservative. After meeting with the Indiana State Department of Health and the CDC Pence said he would “go home and pray on it.”
Pence eventually did authorize a temporary clean needle exchange program for 30 days, though these exchange programs did not receive state funding. A 2018 study by Yale University researchers, published in the medical journal The Lancet HIV, concluded that more immediate action on Pence’s part could have significantly curbed the devastating outbreak.
“It was a total collapse of public health leadership and a dereliction of duty in Indiana,” Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, one of the study’s publishers, said in an interview with the Washington Post. “They could have avoided this epidemic if science took the lead instead of ideology.”
Needless to say, Pence’s track record when it comes to accepting science is dismal at best; and in a time when abiding by scientific evidence and adhering to medical guidelines is more important than ever, many Americans do not find reassurance in their Vice President.
