Georgia Rep. Betty Price has come under fire after she asked a state health official whether it might be possible to quarantine people with HIV to prevent the spread of the virus.
The eyebrow-raising question was asked during a legislative committee discussion about the high numbers of new HIV cases in Georgia, and the related issue of treatment compliance.
“My thinking sometimes goes in strange directions,” prefaced Price, a doctor and wife of Tom Price, the former U.S. health secretary who resigned from the Trump administration last month after controversy over his use of private planes for official travel.
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“What are we legally able to do? And I don’t want to say the ‘quarantine’ word, but I guess I just said it,” Price continued. “Is there an ability, since I would guess that public dollars are expended heavily in prophylaxis and treatment of this condition, so we have a public interest in curtailing the spread. What would you advise, or are there any methods legally that we could do that would curtail the spread?”
While the health official in question didn’t respond directly to the quarantine comment, Price’s question was enough to provoke an outcry among LGBT advocacy groups.
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The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) said Price’s comments displayed a lack of “basic decency” and served to worsen the stigma surrounding HIV testing in the LGBT community.
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“This language coming from anyone is totally unacceptable, but coming from a medical doctor and a Georgia State Representative, it is reprehensible,” GLAAD’s president Sarah Kate Ellis said in a press release.
In a tweet, the NGO Human Rights Campaign lamented the “level of ignorance and bigotry from an elected official.”
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On Saturday, Price complained that her comments were “taken completely out of context,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
“I made a provocative and rhetorical comment as part of a free-flowing conversation… I do not support a quarantine in this public health challenge and dilemma of under-treated HIV patients,” Price said in a statement provided to the Journal-Constitution.
She added that she simply intended to “light a fire” under the public health community, to help improve treatment compliance rates among HIV patients in Georgia.
Price’s official biography says she worked as an anesthesiologist for over 20 years, and served on the boards of the Medical Association of Atlanta and the Medical Association of Georgia, besides being a past president of the American Medical Women’s Association in Atlanta.
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