With the COVID-19 death toll rising and the United States economy plummeting, Indiana’s 9th District Rep. Trey Hollingsworth says reopening the country is more important than any increase in deaths that doing so would bring.
Hollingsworth told Indianapolis radio station WIBC-FM’s Tony Katz in an interview Tuesday, April 14: “There is no zero-harm choice here. We are going to have to look Americans in the eye and say, ‘We are making the best decisions for the most Americans possible,’ and the answer to that is to get Americans back to work, to get Americans back to their businesses.”
On the same day, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes for Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told The Associated Press (AP) that the country is not ready to reopen. “We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we’re not there yet,” Fauci told AP, calling the oft-mentioned goal of May 1 “a bit overly optimistic.”
Hollingsworth continued telling the radio station: “Our GDP [gross domestic product] is supposed to be down 20% alone this quarter. It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils. It is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these two evils and we intend to move forward in that direction.
“That is our responsibility, and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office,” he said.
Today, the reported COVID-19 death toll in Indiana reached 436, with 8,955 reported cases. Nationally, at 4 p.m. on April 14 (when the information was last updated), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 579,005 total cases and 22,252 deaths.
Listen to Rep. Hollingsworth’s radio interview here.
What do you think?
Leave a comment below with your thoughts on Rep. Hollingsworth’s statement.
Rep. Hollingsworth is delivering a carefully developed message designed to build support for reviving the economy at the expense of public health. Its purpose is to energize Republican voters at a time when Republican legislators, governors and the president are getting most of the blame for the hardships we’re all experiencing because of the pandemic and the resulting lockdown.
Hollingsworth is willing to go public with this messaging because he’s confident that southern Indiana voters are blindly obedient and loyal to his party and to Donald Trump. But this statement was utterly tonedeaf, representative of the depraved indifference of Republican lawmakers toward public health and well-being. My hope is that this will be Hollingsworth’s Richard Mourdock moment, and that he’ll be heading home to Tennessee in January.