JD Vance’s New Racist Lie About Haitians And Diseases

After amplifying what started as a viral rumor on Facebook, Donald Trump and JD Vance have since quadrupled down on the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pets. The racist claim spawned multiple bomb threats at local schools and heightened fear in the community, especially among Haitians.

Vance has been proven wrong about the original lie on multiple occasions, but instead of apologizing or backtracking, he started his very own racist rumor about Haitian immigrants in Ohio.

The Republican vice presidential nominee has spent the last week repeatedly posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are causing a rise in communicable diseases including HIV and tuberculosis.

But that’s not true. There has been no “measurable or discernible increase” in diseases, according to Bruce Vanderhoff, director of the state department of health. The agency’s website publishes data on myriad infectious and vaccine-preventable diseases in the state and also does not depict any noticeable rise.

Infectious diseases are often prominent in poorer countries and regions because of a lack of access to health care. But despite Vance’s concoctions, it’s not because the people living in those countries are innately disease carriers.

Vance’s lies about Haitians aren’t just scoring political points off of the most vulnerable among us, but are also echoing extremely dark episodes in history. During the Nazi regime, German doctors falsely claimed that Jewish people were responsible for the spread of typhus, an infectious disease spread by lice.

And one doesn’t need to go back to the Nazi regime to find parallels to Vance’s vicious campaign against Haitian immigrants. In 1983, as the HIV epidemic took hold in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control announced which groups were more at risk, identifying them as “Homosexuals, Heroin users, Hemophiliacs, and Haitians” — especially those who had just arrived in America.

It was “the first time in the history of modern medicine that a pathological condition was tied to a national group,” according to author A. Naomi Paik.

The CDC later removed Haitians from its risk group, saying they were not actually more prone to the virus. But the damage was already done. In the 1990s, Haitian refugees seeking asylum in the U.S. were subjected to HIV/AIDS screenings, and 200 HIV-positive Haitian refugees were held at Guantanamo Bay.

The stigma still persists today. In 2017, then-President Trump reportedly said that the 15,000 Haitian immigrants who had just arrived in the U.S. “all have AIDS.”