It was March 12, 2020, and I was sitting on a moving Amtrak train out of Manhattan and headed to the Hudson train stop. From what I experienced in New York City that day—people drinking themselves silly at noon and scurrying through the streets to get out because of the bad germ on the loose—I had a sudden concern. I thought that the train could be stopped and all passengers put in a bus and taken to a quarantine camp.
Crazy? Not so much. This is what happened on cruise ships two weeks earlier. The United States stopped them in the deep seas and sent helicopters to “rescue” Americans from the virus then spreading. They didn’t want to be rescued of course—they were on vacation and living it up—but the U.S. government thought differently. After that, these poor souls were quarantined for several weeks more while being tested and treated. It was brutal.
Also six years earlier (October 2014) the U.S. government forced aid workers returning from Africa to quarantine on U.S. soil. It was against their wishes. They weren’t sick. They had no symptoms. Still, they were forced to live for weeks in a plastic shell just to make sure. This was entirely because of an Ebola fear, even though Ebola didn’t usually spread asymptomatically. The national media went nuts with anger, but the government overruled concerns about human rights.
In addition, I was well aware of the quarantine powers of the federal government. They were first granted in 1944 with the Public Health Services Act. The purpose of the power was extremely limited. But it did open the door to abuse.
By the way, I’ve never been able to discover a legislative history of this action, much less find out the real reasons for its passage and timing. I would like someone to explain it to me. It was passed while 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned in 10 different camps strewn around the United States. The stated reason was national security. So far as I know, this act wasn’t invoked to defend this policy.
The government quarantine power gradually grew over the years even though it wasn’t often invoked. By the time of the Avian Bird Flu scare of 2005 and 2006, the George W. Bush administration revised the CDC flu protocol to hold out the prospect of mass quarantines. It didn’t happen because that scare proved to be much ado about nothing. Still, the CDC advertised its new powers on its website, so I knew they were there and that many people were extant who wanted to test them.
With all this background, I went to an employee of Amtrak and flat-out asked him what the chances are that the train would be stopped and we would all be put in quarantine. He didn’t think it was likely but he admitted that it was possible. He added that he would be glad when his shift ended.
The train rocked up to Hudson an hour later, and I was thrilled to touch ground and hop into my car. I had avoided quarantine. It so happens that no train was ever stopped, so far as I know. But it was less than a week later when states started imposing stay-at-home orders with the encouragement of the CDC. This was a reflection of a federal edict issued on March 16, 2020, as an implementation of the state of emergency imposed three days earlier in secret.
Before long, people like me were issuing passes to employees who needed to go back and forth to work, something to prove that they were essential employees. You see, the same government had divided the whole workforce into essential and nonessential. Nonessential employees weren’t supposed to leave their homes. For people crossing state borders, you needed to quarantine two weeks before going back again—not that everyone went along with this cockamamie plan, but the rule was there.
We wish her all the luck and hope she prevails. But that still leaves a major problem. The powers still exist at the federal level. We now know for sure that this power can and will be abused. More and better regulations aren’t the answer. The entire power needs to be taken away from the government now, and that means completely repealing the Public Health Service Act of 1944. Now.
So long as the power exists, it will be a grave occasion of sin for all governments at all levels. It can be invoked for anything. There is, in practice, no real restraint. As with the now-in-question New York law, it can pertain to whole families or just kids. There is no time limit. It can happen for any reason. There is no appeal. You can at any time get a knock on your door and be taken away for any reason whatever and quarantined without ever having been read your rights. Indeed, you have no rights.
The quarantine power deletes every other legal right. So long as it exists, we really don’t have any rights, or rather, all rights are contingent on the whims of public health officials or those deputized to act on their behalf. It enables tyranny. And we saw how this unfolds in the cases of Australia and China, two countries that built massive quarantine camps and held thousands of people there without appeal. If you resist, you go to prison.
“Isolation and quarantine help protect the public by preventing exposure to people who have or may have a contagious disease. 1. Isolation separates sick people with a quarantinable communicable disease from people who are not sick. 2. Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick. In addition to serving as medical functions, isolation and quarantine also are ‘police power’ functions, derived from the right of the state to take action affecting individuals for the benefit of society.”
What’s more:
“Public health authorities at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels may sometimes seek help from police or other law enforcement officers to enforce a public health order. ... Breaking a federal quarantine order is punishable by fines and imprisonment. Federal law allows the conditional release of persons from quarantine if they comply with medical monitoring and surveillance.”
Again, this is the law right now. Even after the incredible fiasco of lockdowns and track-and-trace, this power still exists. No one has yet done anything about it. So long as this power exists, there will be plots to use it again. And they will use it again.
Such power is completely unnecessary and should never be invoked in a free society. We should know that by now. If we cannot and will not get rid of these powers, we will have learned nothing from the past three years.
