To my amazement, but 20 years later, this actually came to pass, and the results were far worse than even I expected. The lockdowns were more universal and brutal than I could’ve imagined. I couldn’t have dreamed that they'd abolish church services or tell you how many people you can have in your own home. The restrictions lasted far longer than I thought possible. They did more damage than any policy in my lifetime.
People were more compliant than I expected. The fires of every manner of chaos have burned ever since.
My biggest beef was with the quarantine power itself, which is the foundation of what’s currently called “pandemic planning.” Even back then, it was advertised on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The whole thing amazed me by its sheer unconstitutionality, and also the lack of any real questioning of this power.
To be able to quarantine people is no different from the power to jail anyone under the pretext of controlling infectious diseases. It means nothing that the government qualifies its power based on the notion that you had to have been exposed or be infected.
Everyone at all times, no matter what, is exposed to infectious disease. And we know now that it’s possible to gin up a test that shows anything, even an avocado or potato, to be infected with something.
The power is totalitarian; it never existed in U.S. history. It came about in 1944 with the Public Health Services Act, Section 361. This empowered the surgeon general and other bureaucrats to snag people out of normal life in the name of protecting the country against some terrible infection. The power was broad, even limitless under a loose interpretation, and never challenged, to my knowledge.
I’ve looked repeatedly at the legislative history to figure out why it was passed. Why 1944? What was going on to give rise to this unprecedented expansion of federal power? What interest groups were involved and pushing this? Indeed, why was it written, how did it come to a vote, and what was it attempting to achieve?
I haven’t found a single article anywhere that delves into this issue or explains it. There’s a subject for a dissertation, should anyone care.
Even now, even after we’ve seen how egregious the results of this power are, I’m unaware of any efforts to revisit this dramatic expansion of federal power. No one in the Founding era ever undertook to put such a thing in the U.S. Constitution. They dealt with huge and meaningful pandemics in the period in question, and yet there was no effort to grant government the power to arrest its citizens for being sick. Such a thing would’ve been regarded as unconstitutional.
As far as I know, there are no efforts at all to repeal this power. It should be repealed, completely. It’s too subject to abuse. Sure, in some abstract world, you don’t want people and animals with a dangerous pathogen wandering around and infecting others. Truth is that most people don’t want that either. When people are sick with something that could endanger others, they quarantine themselves. That’s the normal and universal practice.
We can’t rule out that there are people who are unwilling to do that. We, of course, saw this during the AIDS epidemic, when infected people kept engaging in the very behaviors that were causing the disease to spread. It took time before the seriousness of the problem dawned on people and behavior changed. Compulsion didn’t cause the change. Persuasion and education did.
The main issue here is the likelihood of abuse. There’s a very long record of this.
Surely, we’ve learned something from the past four years. And yet, the ethos of mainstream high-level opinion is that the power is essential.
She gets the egregious import. And yet, she heartily approves!
And get this: “A shiny new federal quarantine facility in Omaha — the first constructed in the United States in more than a century — was finished in January 2020, just in time to receive 15 American passengers from the coronavirus-infested Diamond Princess cruise ship.”
Did you know this? While I’m pretty up on the details of this entire fiasco, I had no idea that the federal government had just finished a major quarantine facility right in time, and that it was used to snatch people from their vacations with the claim that they were being rescued and then detain them for a very long time.
At the time, the government claimed that it was saving people from an infectious boat. The whole thing was ridiculous. The people who died in that early outbreak on the ship were the same people who died from COVID-19 throughout the pandemic: the elderly and infirm. Essentially, the government has no real right to interrupt peoples’ vacations by force and put them into a camp without legal representation for an unlimited amount of time.
And don’t tell me that this was just a coincidence that the first-in-a-century federal quarantine camp just happened to be completed in January 2020. If you believe that, you'd also believe that the 2019 “germ games” just so happened to take place before the lockdowns too.
Where are the investigations of this? Who’s on the case? There’s so much more we need to know. How many other quarantine facilities have been built? Who’s approving them, and under what authority?
Good grief, this stuff should be truly terrifying to any civil libertarian. Incredible.
The bottom line is that we need a major and uncompromising legislative push to end the federal quarantine once and for all, including a repeal of the Public Health Services Act of 1944 and a total defunding and defanging of the federal agencies. And a dismantlement of these facilities!
Until that happens, every American is in danger.
