Ah, the old "I was just trying to be edgy" defense.
Betty Price, the wife of former HHS Secretary Tom Price, is defending her comment about quarantining people with HIV as an attempt to be provocative about a public health crisis. [...]
"I made a provocative and rhetorical comment as part of a free-flowing conversation which has been taken completely out of context." she said in a statement to the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Saturday.
In that aforementioned free-flowing conversation, Price had mentioned "quarantine" and noted how Americans with HIV are not dying as "readily" as they once did.
“It seems to me it’s almost frightening the number of people who are living that are potentially carriers, well not carriers, with the potential to spread, whereas in the past they died more readily and at that point they are not posing a risk. So we’ve got a huge population posing a risk if they are not in treatment.”
In her statement, Price says she does not support quarantine, but was trying to "light a fire under all of us" as regards to what to do about the continued spread of HIV. Her own state, Georgia, has among the highest new infection rates in the nation, possibly because like the rest of the Republican-led South, it is firmly in the sucks to be you camp of most national healthcare debates.
I am inclined to cut Betty Price a bit of slack here. Her family is going through a tough time, what with the recent cutbacks on their free private jet usage, and none of us are strangers to the art of "provocative" proposals designed to stir the brain cells of legislators who have made careers of not giving a damn. But the main reason we should suspect that Price was not being serious in her suggestions of quarantine is that, at least to our knowledge, her husband and recently-booted Trump administration health secretary does not own any stock in "quarantine" companies. If we see Republican legislators suddenly start to buy up such stocks, it will be a different story.