West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice on Thursday signed a law restricting needle exchanges in the state, likely shuttering or driving many underground. The move came despite a worsening HIV outbreak, a crisis that needle exchanges have repeatedly been shown to help stop.

In February, a CDC official told a Charleston, West Virginia, city council committee that the country’s “most concerning” HIV outbreak was occurring among people using injection drugs there. Despite needle exchanges helping limit past outbreaks in Indiana and West Virginia, the state will now regulate the programs for the first time. It’s a move that supporters, such as Justice, say is based on “ good science ,” but which public health experts say will hobble the programs, worsening the HIV outbreak and leading to more people dying from drug overdoses.

“You’re actually talking about human beings here. This will kill them or make them sick,” Laura Jones at Milan Puskar Health Right in Morgantown, West Virginia, told BuzzFeed News.

Programs in one of the three counties Jones’ programs operate in will likely be shut down by the law’s requirements that county politicians and city officials approve of them. “This is just going to drive some programs underground,” she said.

The basic idea behind needle exchanges — shown to be effective in two decades of public health research and endorsed by the Trump administration — is to give new needles to people using illegal drugs so they don’t share used ones and spread disease, while also offering them healthcare and an entry point into treatment. There are more than a dozen needle exchange programs in West Virginia, already hit hard by the nationwide epidemic of illicit opioid drug use and overdoses. The HIV outbreak in Charleston followed the city ending its own needle exchange program in 2018 over complaints about needle litter. Similarly, nearby Cabell County limited its program that year to people willing to use state identification, which cost it half of its participants and sparked an HIV outbreak there .

“When you have an HIV outbreak, you want to get needles to as many people as possible. This law will instead shut down almost every program in West Virginia,” said West Virginia University public health expert Robin Pollini. Local politicians are unlikely to OK the programs, she said.

Additionally, the restrictions contradict CDC guidelines for needle exchanges, making it likely that other health conditions, like hepatitis and endocarditis, will increase along with drug overdoses since the programs are a leading provider of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone in the state. “This will be the strictest needle exchange law in the country, and I worry it will be a model for other states trying to regulate them out of existence,” said Pollini.

Supporters of the new law , such as lead sponsor state Sen. Eric Tarr, have said it is aimed at eliminating needle litter and programs that don’t automatically enroll drug users into recovery programs. Among other restrictions, the law would require needle exchanges to label syringes (linking the needle to a user) and mandate state licensing to operate. Against CDC recommendations, exchanges would strive for matching the number of needles handed out with the number of returns, could only give needles to people with state-issued identification (discouraging people experiencing homelessness or people using illicit drugs who fear being arrested from participating), and would prevent people from picking up needles for other participants, which can be helpful in a rural state with limited public transportation.

The law seems particularly aimed at needle exchanges not connected to local health departments, like Charleston’s Solutions Oriented Addiction Response (SOAR) nonprofit. Charleston’s police department investigated SOAR in undercover operations before concluding in January it wasn’t breaking any law against operating without a license, because the state doesn’t offer licenses. The group helped uncover the HIV outbreak in Charleston last fall by offering testing to participants, along with food and medical care.

In late March, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia demanded an inquiry into the CDC’s finding of an HIV outbreak in Kanawha County, where Charleston is located. Instead of asking for help from the federal health agency as would normally happen in such an outbreak, Kanawha County commissioners questioned the CDC’s evidence for an HIV outbreak, based on medical test results reported to the state health department. The city has postponed voting on its own needle exchange ordinance until April 19, while it waits for the state licensing law to go through.

“There’s no doubt in my mind, or any freshman public health analysis, that this bill is an HIV-spreader,” said SOAR coleader Joe Solomon in an email. “We’re not going to let more of our people die, or get HIV, if we can help it.”

“Imagine if giving out masks were illegal during COVID-19: would you still make sure your family and loved ones were protected?” asked Solomon. “Of course you would.”

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Virginia teacher confronts student for not acknowledging race during lesson

Loudoun County parent Ian Prior and Red Renaissance President Kim Klacik discuss the controversy over critical race theory being pushed in schools.

Equal opportunity for all. Judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Diversity of thought , experience, and perspective.

These are principles that we as Americans and Virginians should live by and teach our children. It is a philosophy of thought and action that moves humanity forward to a place where cooperation, meritocracy, and compassion will make the world a better place for all.

Unfortunately, what is happening in Virginia’s schools is threatening those goals. We are talking about critical race theory or CRT which stands for the ideology that everything must be evaluated through the lens of race in order to break down systemic bias in our culture, words, and institutions.

It is a theory that evolved from the French postmodernist philosopher and political activist Michael Foucault.

VIRGINIA PARENTS GROUP LAUNCHES PAC TO UNSEAT SCHOOL BOARD MEMBERS OVER REOPENING, RACE CONTROVERSIES

In the decades that followed, his philosophy was adapted to deal with racial questions and has gone mainstream through works like “White Fragility” by Robin Di-Angelo and “How to Be an Anti-Racist” by Ibram Kendi. Add in a summer of unrest following the death of George Floyd, and you have government institutions, corporations, and local school boards accepting this theory as gospel based on pressure from spineless, weak extremists.

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In Virginia’s schools, administrators and school board members won’t admit the commitment to critical race theory. Instead, you will hear about their commitment to “equity” and the need to be “anti-racist.”

Make no mistake, “equity” is only critical race theory by different name and ‘anti-racists’ are the army of activists deployed to implement the theory.

To be clear, equity and equality are not the same thing. From Mental Floss: ” Equality has to do with giving everyone the exact same resources, whereas equity involves distributing resources based on the needs of the recipients.”

Two examples in Northern Virginia show how equity is implemented.

In Fairfax County, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, one of the top public high schools in America, has a substantial minority population – 70% of its students are Asian. As explained by the non-partisan Reason.com: ‘Education officials…decided to jettison the school’s famously tough admissions test in favor of a “holistic” (i.e., subjective and arbitrary) system that will permit officials to reject Asian-American students in favor of less-deserving students who belong to other racial categories.’

VIRGINIA COUNTY SPENDS NEARLY $500G ON RACE PROGRAMS FOR SCHOOLS

Loudoun County Public Schools is following suit with its push to re-adjust the racial composition of Loudoun Academies with lower standards in order to reduce the high Asian population to make it more equitable for Black students.

The likely result of both of these misguided actions is to try and help Black students, with Asian students as collateral damage, and White students actually benefiting from the change. This is the kind of backward thinking that seeks a right-size fits all result and ultimately creates community animosity, increases racial tensions, and turns high-performing schools into failures.

As for the term “anti-racist,” it sounds perfectly fine on its face, but look no further than Ibram Kendi’s book for what it really means: ‘[i]f discrimination is creating equity, then it is anti-racist.’ Put another way by scholar James Lindsay, ‘[t]here is only active antiracism. In fact, to be passively antiracist would be to be passively racist, instead.’

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According to both definitions, supporting colorblind policies and judging someone by the content of their character is, to the anti-racist, a form of racism. According to critical race theory, it is therefore the job of the anti-racist to turn everyone away from a colorblind approach in order to end implicit bias.

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We have seen this taken to a dangerous extreme in Loudoun County where a private Facebook group called “The Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” began a campaign to list fellow parents and punish them for speaking out against critical race theory in schools.

The activities of this group – now known nationally as Chardonnay Antifa – have opened a Pandora’s Box for Loudoun County Public Schools.

We have seen continued embarrassing and national coverage of a school advisory board putting out a statement to “silence the opposition,” emails from that same advisory board demanding that teachers be fired for providing “negative feedback” on critical race theory training, a teacher berating a student for refusing to recognize the supposed racial differences in a picture, and a parent’s Go Fund Me page taken down because of demands by Chardonnay Antifa.

Any objective person looking at these policies and actions motivated by critical race theory would see them for what they are – dangerous and regressive. Issues of race, equality, and fairness have always been challenging in our country. But as Martin Luther King Jr. asked, “where do we go from here, chaos or community?” The answer is clear — we as a community must commit to compassion, understanding, and the commitment to equal rights for all.

Conversely, the chaos of critical race theory rolls back the clock on our progress and seeks to play identity politics to divide Americans.

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It has no place in Virginia and that is why I joined with several parents across the ideological spectrum to start a new political action committee called Fightforschools.com. If our local government will not operate with transparency and responsiveness, then we will use the legal process to remove them and elect a new school board.

We hope that this will be a model for parents to follow across America as they work to take back their communities from special interests that seek to push regressive, divisive, and dangerous theories in our education system.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM IAN PRIOR

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Fox News Flash top headlines for April 13

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what’s clicking on Foxnews.com.

A political action committee (PAC) launched Tuesday with the intent of unseating multiple school board members in one of Virginia’s most populous counties because of an ongoing feud over critical race theory.

The Loudoun County school board members showed a complete “misunderstanding of their duties and responsibility as elected officials,” reads a press release from Fight for Schools PAC.

It specifically names Beth Barts, Brenda Sheridan, Ian Serotkin, Denise Corbo, Leslee King and Atoosa Reaser. Each were reportedly part of a secret Facebook group where members compiled a list of parents who opposed critical race theory in the school district, according to the Daily Wire .

Tuesday’s announcement comes amid division and turmoil within one of the nation’s top counties for public education. For months, parents and school officials have wrestled with questions about reopenings and equity trainings.

VIRGINIA PARENTS, TEACHERS GROUP ACCUSED OF ‘RACKETEERING,’ INTIMIDATING CONSERVATIVE PARENTS

Last month, the Daily Wire reported that members of the “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” Facebook group made disparaging comments about other parents who opposed critical race theory.

The PAC is led by Ian Prior, a Loudoun County parent who previously worked for the National Republican Congressional Committee and former President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice.

“For the sake of our children, Loudoun County parents cannot wait until 2023 to elect new leaders,” Prior said.

“Fortunately, Virginia law provides a remedy for new elections; recalling government officials that have abused their office or been incompetent in the performance of their duties. Both apply here, whether applied to the school board’s failure to reopen schools, its implementation of dangerously divisive critical race theory, and its active or passive participation in tactics designed to intimidate students, parents and teachers from exercising their First Amendment rights.”

The PAC is a project of Loudoun Parents for Education (LPE), which launched a recall effort at the end of last month. That press conference saw about 25 parents, according to Prior. He told Fox News that around 300-400 people have signed up on LPE’s website to help advance his cause. Prior added that he’s willing to accept money outside of the state and county, noting that he views this as a model for parents around the country to follow.

Starting with a budget goal of $250,000-$500,000, the group plans to use “earned media, paid media and polling to build public awareness on what is happening in Loudoun County’s schools.”

The press release also notes plans for a campaign to collect signatures for the recall, as well as find new candidates to replace them.

VIRGINIA COUNTY SPENDS NEARLY $500G ON RACE PROGRAMS FOR SCHOOLS

One of those targeted for recall – Beth Barts – has already faced significant consequences for her social media activity. Last month, the school board voted to censure her, finding that she violated several components of a school board code of conduct. School Board Chair Sheridan, whom the PAC is also trying to unseat, announced just days after the censure that she was removing Barts from her committee assignments.

Loudoun County Public Schools did not immediately respond to Fox News’ request for comment. While the county has denied teaching critical race theory, parents like Prior argue that their equity initiatives promote the same concepts typically associated with that school of thought.

Outside of disputes over labels, the tension in the county has been palpable. A middle school teacher, who is also a member of the secret Facebook group, issued a scathing statement last week that appeared to be directed at parents who opposed the county’s trainings.

“Over the past few weeks, a small group of Loudoun residents have put their racism on display for the nation,” said the speaker, who was identified as Andrea Weiskopf.

“They have been emboldened by the meekness and silence of those on the school board and in the community … it is the duty of the school board to acknowledge such overt and blatant racism against the students under your care.”

Prior, who also spoke at the virtual meeting, called her comments defamatory.

In a statement to Fox News, LCPS said: “The individual who spoke is a Loudoun County Public Schools teacher, not an elected official or a member of the school division’s administration. Teachers have the right, as individuals, to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech. Loudoun County Public Schools has stated , consistently, that it does not condone the actions of employees – or anyone – who would target fellow members of the community for expressing their viewpoint.”

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The interim superintendent previously issued a statement defending the county’s practices.

“In explaining LCPS’ equity priorities, it might be helpful to state what they are not. They are not an effort to indoctrinate students and staff into a particular philosophy or theory. What they are is an effort to provide a welcoming, inclusive, affirming environment for all students,” said Interim Superintendent Scott A. Ziegler.

“LCPS’ work on equity is a journey that requires the commitment of staff at all levels. I feel the staff’s work, which has been sustained, honest and undertaken in good faith, has been misrepresented recently by some members of the public,” he added.