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A Republican representative from Georgia, who is married to former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, inquired about the legality of quarantining HIV patients in a bid to end the virus that causes AIDs.
“What are we legally able to do?” Dr. Betty Price asked Dr. Pascale Wortley, the director of the HIV/AIDS Epidemiology Surveillance Section at the state Department of Public Health.
“I don’t want to say the ‘quarantine’ word, but I guess I just said it… What would happen if you advise, or are there any methods legally, that we could do that would curtail the spread?”
Like her husband, Price is a medical professional and has worked as an anesthesiologist for more than 20 years. She’s additionally served on the boards of the Medical Association of Atlanta and the Medical Association of Georgia. She’s also the former president of the American Medical Women’s Association in Atlanta.
“It just seems to me its almost frightening the number of people who are living that are potentially carriers — well, they are carriers — but, potential to spread,” she said during the public meeting. “Whereas in the past, they died more readily, and then at that point, they are not posing a risk. So, we’ve got a huge population posing a risk if they’re not in treatment.”
Tom Price, who resigned from Trump’s cabinet last month, raised the issue during the Tuesday meeting, CNN reported. Wortley did not directly address the question, instead discussing programs to track and identify HIV patients.
Her comments sparked immediate backlash from human rights advocates and LGTBQ groups, many of them calling on her to apologize and others demanding her resignation.
“We have come a long way in how we understand and talk about HIV as a nation, and comments like those made by Georgia State Representative Betty Price fly in the face of that progress, and of basic decency,” Sarah Kate Ellis, the president of GLAAD, said in a written statement.
She added while such commentary is always “unacceptable,” the fact that it came from a lawmaker was “reprehensible.”
According to the Centers for Disease and Prevention Control, roughly 1.1 million people in the United States were living with HIV at the end of 2014.
As of 2015, only four other states had more cases of HIV than Georgia, according to the state Department of Health Website.
With News Wire Services