98% Of Counties Most At Risk For HIV Outbreaks Voted For Trump

Donald Trump talked little about HIV and AIDS on the campaign trail. But actions speak louder than words, and Trump has already chosen a governor whose policies helped cause an HIV outbreak as his vice president and a vocal opponent of the Affordable Care Act and LGBT rights as his secretary of health and human services. But while HIV prevention may not be a priority for the Trump administration, a sudden outbreak is likely to disproportionately affect Trump voters who live in rural counties hit hard by the nation’s opioid epidemic.
By far the most common cause of HIV transmission is male-to-male sexual contact, which accounted for more than 26,000 new cases in 2015. But another 2,300 cases last year were the result of using infected syringes to inject drugs. Nearly a tenth of those occurred in a single rural county in southern Indiana. It’s a story Vice President-Elect Mike Pence knows well, given it was his reluctance as governor to go against his religious beliefs and institute a clean syringe exchange program that helped cause that HIV outbreak, which occurred in Scott County.
Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determined the 220 counties most at risk of an outbreak similar to what occurred in Scott County. Primarily clustered in Appalachia, these counties are overwhelmingly poor and rural, areas hit hard by unemployment and the opioid drug epidemic. They also have something else in common: 216 of the 220 counties voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence on November 8, with the Republican ticket capturing 71 percent of the total vote in those most vulnerable counties, according to Vocativ’s analysis. Scott County voted 68 percent for Trump and Pence.
Because of its historical ties with advocacy by LGBT groups, advocacy for HIV prevention might appear to be a progressive, left-leaning issue. And it’s true that those hit hardest are still the black and LGBT communities. But on the particular issue of sudden outbreaks, where many are infected at once, the highest risk has shifted to rural, predominately white communities where syringe drug use has become more common and HIV awareness is lower. In other words, it’s the same overlooked population that helped drive Trump’s upset victory.