Communicable disease rates in Springfield, Ohio, have not ‘skyrocketed,’ despite JD Vance’s claim

When Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has repeated the debunked claim that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pets, he has often made other assertions about the immigrant community’s effect on the city. Specifically about its effect on public health. 

"This town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in. Health care costs are up, housing costs are up," Vance said in a Sept. 10 CNN interview after former President Donald Trump repeated during a presidential debate the Pants on Fire claims about migrants eating pets. "Communicable diseases like HIV and TB (tuberculosis) have skyrocketed in this small Ohio town." 

Vance said something similar a few days later.

"In Springfield, Ohio, there has been a massive rise in communicable diseases," Vance posted Sept. 13 on X.

In interviews as recently as Sept. 15, he has continued to make the claim. 

As Haitian immigrants have moved to Springfield in the past four years, local resources, including for public health, have been strained, officials say. But county health data doesn’t support Vance’s claim that communicable disease rates have skyrocketed. Overall, communicable disease rates, excluding COVID-19 cases, have generally dropped since 2018 in Clark County. The rate rose in 2022, but in 2023, it hit its lowest point since 2015. 

A Trump-Vance campaign spokesperson sent us data screenshots showing Clark County HIV and TB case rates from 2013 to 2023. (Springfield is in Clark County.) The graphs in the screenshots appeared to show largely upward trends in TB cases from 2018 to 2023 and in HIV cases from 2020 to 2023.

The complete source of the TB data — Clark County’s Communicable Disease Cumulative Report 2013 to 2023 — showed four TB cases in 2023, an increase of one case over the last year. Since 2013, TB cases have fluctuated between zero to three cases.

We did not find the exact report the Trump-Vance team cited for HIV cases, but official data from Clark County’s HIV and AIDS Report 2018 to 2022 showed that from 2021 to 2022, HIV cases rose by one, while the county’s preliminary 2023 data showed a one-year, 16-case increase.

Public health experts said they wouldn’t describe that increase as skyrocketing, and one epidemiologist said the TB and HIV changes were not statistically significant.

The experts also cautioned against tying those numbers to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, because public data does not sort health conditions by a patient’s country of nationality, immigration status or demographics.

"There is no clear association with the recent changes in demographics of the county," David Wohl, a University of North Carolina infectious diseases professor, said. 

Official data doesn’t show a rise in overall communicable disease rates in Clark County.

Communicable diseases in Clark County spiked from 2020 to 2022, reaching 13,700 cases per 100,000 people, before dropping to 3,723 cases in 2023. That large increase was caused by COVID-19, not immigration, Maria Gallo, associate dean of research at Ohio State University’s College of Public Health said.

Looking at the data without COVID-19 cases, communicable disease rates in Clark County have not increased in the past year; they have generally declined since 2018.

In 2023, the case rate was 1,017 per 100,000 people, the lowest rate since 2015. There was a slight increase in 2022 — a rate of 1,302 cases per 100,000 people. But that rate was still lower than communicable disease rates in 2018 (1,431 cases) and 2019 (1,394), before the increase in immigration in the county. 

And even those post-2020 rates could be an overcount. That’s because, as the county noted in its data report, the county relied on 2020 Census Bureau population estimates — 136,000 people — to calculate the rate.

That means the estimate "may not be an accurate reflection of the current number of people in Clark County due to substantial population growth since 2020," the report said. "Case rates are directly impacted by the total population number, and therefore case rates presented here may be higher than the actual case rate for Clark County." 

If the county’s population is larger than it was in the 2020 Census, then the communicable disease rate is slightly lower than its current estimates.

In 2020, census figures showed Springfield alone had about 58,000 residents. But local officials have said about 15,000 Haitian immigrants have moved to Springfield in the past four years.

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Clark County’s TB and HIV cases have been in single and low double digits for years. This makes small changes in raw case numbers look like big percentage swings.

For example, in 2022, the county reported three TB cases. That went up to four in 2023. Preliminary 2024 data shows four TB cases.

"Going from three to four cases is not meaningful," Wohl said. 

Even though there has been an increase in case numbers, "I wouldn't use the term ‘skyrocketing’ to describe it," Amesh Adalja, senior scholar for Johns Hopkins’ Center for Health Security said. "These are very small numbers from an already low baseline. So I think what people need to understand is that there's a lot of hyperbolic statements being made."

Overall, sexually transmitted infections are down. They rose from 2013 to 2018 and have fluctuated since, but they dropped from 895 cases per 100,000 people in 2022 to 717 in 2023.

At the same time, public health experts acknowledged that HIV cases have recently increased.

Official HIV data showed there were 10 cases in 2018, six cases in 2019 and 2020, 12 in 2021 and 13 in 2022. There is no official HIV data for 2023 or 2024, but preliminary data shows 29 cases in 2023 and 26 in 2024. 

Gallo, who specializes in sexual and reproductive epidemiology, noted that sexually transmitted disease cases dropped "at the beginning of the pandemic as people were staying at home."

But she said that when taking into account the percentage of the county’s population that had HIV and the confidence interval — a measure used to determine whether those changes are statistically significant — the 2023 and 2024 HIV case numbers do not represent a significant change from 2018’s figures.  

Public health experts warned against making inferences about the county’s communicable disease data.

For example, Clark County’s communicable disease, HIV and TB data aren’t reported by demographics such as race, ethnicity, nationality or immigration status. So, it’s unclear what effect Haitian immigrants are having on disease rates in the county. 

"Without more information, it would be unwarranted to conclude that the change was due to Haitian migrants," Gallo said. "HIV and TB cases can rise and fall over time in populations – and these changes are in a large part due to whether we are investing in public health. "

The county’s health department did not respond to our request for demographic-specific data.

Additionally, the data isn’t sorted by city. So it’s unclear whether cases were clustered in certain areas or spread out across the county. 

So "attributing any changes to a specific group is highly problematic, especially when the increase is three or four cases a year," Madhav Bhatta, Kent State University public health professor, said.

Adalja said he "wouldn’t be surprised if there were individuals that were immigrants from Haiti that have tuberculosis or have HIV. Certainly the prevalence of those diseases are higher in Haiti than they are in Ohio."

But looking at case numbers alone doesn’t provide enough information about what a change in TB and HIV case numbers means for the county’s public health, he said. Local public health experts need to get case information to understand who the patients are, how they got infected and ensure they can be treated.

Ohio’s Department of Health told PolitiFact that the increase in Haitian immigrants in a short time has strained health care services in Springfield, leading to longer wait times for appointments. 

The state’s health department is establishing a health clinic in Springfield "as soon as this week to help increase primary care access for the entire community," the statement said.

Vance said,  "Communicable diseases like HIV and TB have skyrocketed" after Haitian migrants came to Springfield, Ohio. 

The overall communicable disease rate in Clark County dropped in 2023. And communicable diseases have generally dropped since 2018 — when COVID-19 is removed — with 2023 marking the lowest rate on record since 2015. 

Clark County reported that even these figures could be an overstatement, because 2020 Census data does not account for possible increases in the county’s population.

TB cases have risen by one to two cases a year in the past four years. Official HIV case data also shows a rise in one case from 2021 to 2022, and preliminary data suggests there were 29 HIV cases in 2023. That’s a larger rise, but one epidemiologist told PolitiFact that change does not appear to be statistically significant.

County data doesn’t break down case numbers by city or demographics. So it’s unclear whether Haitian immigrants in Springfield are behind the rise in HIV and TB cases in the county. And public health experts pushed back against making those kinds of inferences.

The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.