Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) hasn't just been making demonstrably false claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating local residents' pets -- he's also falsely accused the immigrants of spreading diseases.
The New Republic's Greg Sargent this week spoke with Clark County Health Commissioner Chris Cook, who walked through the ways that Vance's claims are, as Sargent describes them, "nonsense."
First, Sargent takes apart Vance's claims that cases of HIV and tuberculosis have been skyrocketing since Haitian immigrants began moving into Springfield.
While it's true that cases have technically been rising, the numbers of total cases are so small as to be a numerical blip.
In total, there was one case of tuberculosis in 2021, three cases in 2022, and four in 2023.
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Cases of HIV, meanwhile, rose from five per 100,000 people in 2020 to nine per 100,000 people in 2022, which Sargent notes is barely higher than the average of seven cases per 100,000 in the rest of Ohio.
And that's not all, as Cook says that cases of TB and HIV are only a small section of the full public health picture in Clark County.
“If you look at all reportable diseases as a whole, they’re actually going down,” he explained to Sargent.
Cook also explained to Sargent that "as a measure of total health of a population,” you can make better determinations less by studying “individual diseases” and more by studying “trends of groups of diseases," which happen to be trending down in Clark County at the moment.
