Will Mike Pence decide who may die? (Suppose the coronavirus pandemic is managed as AIDS was)

Comment posted on New York Times blog in response to editorial, ”Here comes the coronavirus pandemic,” February 29, 2020:

If only because of what he should be understand to represent, Vice-President Mike Pence is the worst possible person to be placed in charge of the national response to a deadly virus that threatens to become a pandemic. This is because of the eternal infamy that must be placed at the doorstep of the American evangelical Protestant "Christian" far right, to which he belongs.

Anyone remember the AIDS epidemic? Many, often gay men, were allowed to die, as conservative politicians condemned. as an abnormal direction, their amatory practices. Exclusionary propriety, not solidarity.

At the Red Cross where I briefly worked, the boss, one Elizabeth Dole, a conservative Christian politician, would give speeches comparing herself to the Biblical Esther, who "came out" (as a Jew) to plead to avert the murder of her people. But then as now, it was less a question of avoiding harm as doing little or nothing to stop it. Conservatives would smugly speak privately of the "family values" they must defend against the cultural threat of modernity. "Values" triumphed as many people needlessly died.

The response to global pandemics, natural disasters, and perilous migrations of poor people desperately escaping civil wars in regions devastated by "humanitarian" Western intervention, often to promote liberal "democracy" over socialism, is "live and let die." "Do no harm," the doctor's oath, becomes "At least do no harm. (It's ok to do nothing)."

It is not.