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    Quarantine: Are Civil Liberties Obsolete in the ReDS Age?

    How do we balance the rights of at-risk people with the rights of everybody else?

    Started by: RJ Eskow Raves:5

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    I’m a strong civil liberties guy, so consider this a devil’s advocate question: Can we afford to keep our freedoms in a time of epidemic? Others are going to ask this question, so I’d like to see us discuss it among ourselves.

    This issue is not unlike the civil liberties and torture debates of a decade ago. Sure, we pride ourselves on being an open society. People are complaining nowadays about how hard it is to move from one state to another, now that so many are requiring residence permits before you can work or find housing. They’re saying that residence permits are nothing more than “medical passports.”

    There is widespread opposition to the President’s decision to merge the Department of Health Services and the Department of Homeland Security, creating the enormous (and notorious) “HS2.” And there is widespread fear that technical means are being used to spy on the private lives of Americans to determine who might be a medical risk. These measures are being disproportionately addressed to those who are most at risk of contracting ReDS – the poor, minorities, and people with alternative lifestyles.

    On the other hand, there are those who argue that they have the “right” not to die of ReDS! As the inflammatory right-wing politician Bristol Palin said last week, “It’s great that some do-gooders want to protect poor people. But what about saving my ten-year-old from getting sick and dying?”

    Behind all the rhetoric lie some difficult and important questions: What should we do when a patient won’t comply with quarantine restrictions? Should at-risk people be required to submit to medical examinations before travelling? Do their individual freedoms outweigh the collective right of society to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”?

    Will Rogers that “your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” Does your right to travel and spread your germs also end where my nose begins? Or freedom so important that we should be prepared to take risks – and even possibly die – to maintain it?

    Do we even know how ReDS spreads yet? Here\\\'s the thing: Steps should be taken to prevent the spread of the disease, but those decisions cannot be snap judgements made by politicians instead of medical experts. However, anyone who knows they have ReDS and violates the quarantine should be treated as if they were knowingly endangering others, something like a manslaughter charge. They could then be charged with a crime and placed in a quarantine Jail, which is not as nice as voluntary quarantine in your home. So long as the individual was arrested properly and gets due process, then no civil liberties are being violated at all.

    Unlike some types of crises, in a potential pandemic it is far better to over-react at the beginning and then reign in the restrictions later, than to under-react and have to deal with widespread illness later. There are programs underway already in the US to aggressively identify and isolate ReDS carriers, and they go far beyond simple monitoring. I repeat: this has already begun in certain communities. I am a big \\\"civil-liberties guy\\\" as well, but ReDS is the biggest risk to \\\"life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness\\\" that we currently face. Threats to health are more urgent than threats to liberty. While there should be controls in place to prevent abuses of power, a pandemic needs to be addressed in strictly utilitarian terms.

    In any time of great peril and need we sacrifice some freedoms of the few for the safety and security of the many. Due to the nature of ReDS, it's medium being mucosae discharge, and it being airborne, we will be enacting restrictions based on usage of filter masks and gloves.

    I am generally a proponent of the idea that "they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety," but liberty in this context is a strange concept. It seems obvious that police or health inspectors should not enter an individuals home without permission, but when people leave their homes to enter into a public domain, their rights become less cut and dry. We have always submitted to security scans at airports under the assumption that we are electing to suspend our rights for a moment in the interest of the safety of the group. It seems that this mentality should be extended to individuals traveling during an epidemic. If you are infected, you have the right to enjoy your private space and live out your days unmolested in any way you wish. But you do not have the right to act however you like in the public sphere, if these actions bring dangers to others. This is the place where rights and responsibilities overlap.

    The situation is problematic, to say the least, but if we are going to address our fundamental problems we MUST have a free and open society. Closing down society any further will only hinder our abilities to address the four other superthreats in ways that are not acceptable. It is true, that we do not want a society where someone with ReDS goes around willfully infecting others, nor do we want to encourage the spread of disease through people traveling, but at the same time, there must be a fine line drawn in how this is dealt with. The state security apparatus continues to act with the idea that the individual does not and cannot act in the best interests of society at large or is too uninformed to do so. I think this assertion is patently false and can be addressed through an aggressive public information campaign and outreach to affected individuals. I would also disagree, on a philosophical level with the statement that one has a right not to get sick and die of any particular disease. This is not true. What is true, is that one has a right to be protected from someone willingly trying to spread the disease and this is something that must be watched for, of course. At the same time, to turn the US into a police state will solve no problems and exacerbate the other ones.

    I may be profiling here, but I think people that go into the Public Health field are a very different variaty than those who go into the Executive Branch/Military/Police. These people in the Public Health field didn't join for power or perks (for the most part, and I am not saying those in law enforcement did, just that if anyone is more likly to try and sieze the reins of power it would be those of the Department of Homeland Security/US Army/FBI/INS and so forth, NOT the CDC). The taken into account, I believe more power should be handed to them and that merging the Department of Public Health & Human Services with the Department of Homeland Security would be detrimental. The CDC will have the goal of Disease Prevention and should not have hidden agendas or become drunk with power as is very possible with DHS. Therefore Civil Liberties should not be a problem in the hands of those who aren't typically enforcers and the best interests of the public should be served. On a side note, although it may be purly cosmetic, even if my civil liberties were abused, I would rather it be by a doctor than an heavily armed guardsmen or police officer.




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