By PoliZette Staff | February 27, 2020

After Donald Trump announced this week that Vice President Mike Pence would be leading the coronavirus prevention efforts, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was quick to respond by calling this decision “absurd.” Now, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is firing back at her in a big way.

Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitter right after Trump’s announcement to blast Pence by bringing up the way he handled an HIV outbreak during his time as governor of Indiana.

“Mike Pence literally does not believe in science,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “It is utterly irresponsible to put him in charge of US coronavirus response as the world sits on the cusp of a pandemic. This decision could cost people their lives. Pence’s past decisions already have.”

Mike Pence literally does not believe in science.

It is utterly irresponsible to put him in charge of US coronavirus response as the world sits on the cusp of a pandemic.

This decision could cost people their lives. Pence’s past decisions already have. https://t.co/NhMPOusOWm

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 27, 2020

Huckabee did not hesitate to respond to the young Democratic socialist by shutting her down.

“She ought to look up the word ‘literally,’ which she uses rather frequently without understanding what it means,” he told “Outnumbered Overtime.” Huckabee continued: “To say that Mike Pence doesn’t believe in science is absurd. But then a lot of the things that she says tend to be absurd.”

Huckabee went on to say that the “health crisis” we are currently facing as a nation should not be politicized.

“The tragedy is, I think it is despicable that people are using this whole potential health crisis as an opportunity to get into very narrowly defined partisan politics,” he said. “There is a genuine concern that we all ought to have, but it ought to transcend whether we’re the left of the right—this is not a horizontal issue: left, right, liberal, conservative. It’s a vertical issue, we’re either doing it right or we’re not doing it right and that’s what we ought to focus on.”

Huckabee concluded his comments by saying that Pence doesn’t need to be a “medical doctor to coordinate” the effort and that his experience as a governor overseeing a “state response” to health issues makes him the “right person” for the job.

“He’s in a position to bring together all of the public health officials and the top minds in the world to help make sure that we get the right response,” he said.

Politicizing the coronavirus is a new low for Democrats like AOC. We are facing a health crisis that could potentially bring our nation to its knees, yet Democrats are more focused on pinning it on Trump than they are on actually finding a solution.

We have no reason to doubt that Pence and the rest of the Trump administration will do everything in their power to quell the coronavirus outbreak. They’ve taken care of the American people for the past three years, and they aren’t about to stop now.

This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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