MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Quarantine’

Coronavirus vs. Constitution: What can government stop you from doing in a pandemic?

Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2020

Apparently pretty much anything it wants.

Precedents are set.

People are trained to obey…or else.

Laws do not go away. Income tax, social security, tax withholding are a few that come to mind.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article241106636.html

By Hayley Fowler

Public closures, a ban on gatherings, quarantine notices and orders for isolation have become increasingly common as the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States.

Officials in Washington state and San Francisco are limiting the number of people allowed to attend public gatherings. The governor of California joined them on Thursday in urging the cancellation of all events with more than 250 people in attendance.

The governor of Kentucky, a Bible belt state, has asked churches and other religious institutions to temporarily cancel services.

But if it seems these actions are infringing on individual freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, think again.

“You don’t have a right to assemble against the backdrop of known public health risk,” James G. Hodge told McClatchy News.

Hodge is the director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University, an affiliate of the Network for Public Health Law. As the number of COVID-19 cases climbs, he said, the types of “aggressive measures” taking place in some parts of the country will be used elsewhere.

As of Thursday, more than a dozen states from California to North Carolina have declared a state of emergency to try and stop the spread of the coronavirus.

Hodge said those declarations help shape how public health officials can respond at the state and local level, enabling them to act fast while instituting forms of social distancing — “which is one of the only tools we have available to us” during a public health crisis like the coronavirus pandemic, he said.

Officials typically have to go through legal processes to close an establishment or shut down public gatherings, Hodge said. But under a state of emergency, everything is expedited.

“It’s not that we don’t have time for First Amendment interests, it’s that we must act fast,” he said. “What was opened today can be closed tomorrow.”

Getting the courts involved

That doesn’t mean communities in the U.S. will see the kind of large-scale lock-downs happening in Italy and China, Hodge added.

But there are circumstances under which a voluntary recommendation can become involuntary.

A man in Missouri left quarantine to attend a father-daughter dance at a nearby hotel, McClatchy reported, prompting county health officials to warn “he must remain in his home or they will issue a formal quarantine that will require him and the rest of his family to stay in their home by the force of law.”

When someone opts to evade such recommendations, Hodge said, public health authorities can seek a court order mandating their compliance.

“Some of those basic liberties are going to be truncated for a brief period,” he said. “Most Americans understand the need for that.”

But these types of public closures and requests for self-quarantine aren’t without good reason — it’s “flattening the curve,” Vox reported.

If officials don’t stop the rapid spread of coronavirus, or at least slow it down, epidemiologists have said the health care system could be “overwhelmed by a sudden explosion of illness that requires more people to be hospitalized than it can handle,” according to Vox.

Our #FlattenTheCurve graphic is now up on @Wikipedia with proper attribution & a CC-BY-SA licence. Please share far & wide and translate it into any language you can! Details in the thread below. #Covid_19 #COVID2019 #COVID19 #coronavirus Thanks to @XTOTL & @TheSpinoffTV pic.twitter.com/BQop7yWu1Q

— Dr Siouxsie Wiles (@SiouxsieW) March 10, 2020

Least intrusive means

Still, these measures aren’t undertaken without due process.

“The government does have sweeping powers to combat communicable disease but there are limits,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Stanley told McClatchy News officials have a set of guidelines to follow when it comes to making these decisions — it has to be overwhelmingly in the public interest, rooted in rational, scientific ends and done by the least intrusive means possible. There must also be a mechanism to challenge it.

Officials can’t, for example, use COVID-19 as an excuse or pretext “to achieve illegitimate ends” like shutting down a protest or discriminating against certain groups, he said.

Hodge said these types of measures aren’t designed to be punitive, they’re protective — and they don’t “trip any constitutional safeguards when done right.”

He pointed to a case from the 1980s in West Virginia where a man who officials suspected had tuberculosis was involuntarily confined in quarantine. The man argued he was denied due process when the trial court delayed appointing him an attorney, and judges agreed.

That, Hodge said, is an example of what not to do in a public health emergency.

“There really are definitive checklists of things you have to show to utilize quarantine and isolation powers at the level we’re going to see,” he told McClatchy.

‘Not guesswork’

But he said state and local health authorities know that — “this is not guesswork.”

The coronavirus hasn’t caught the public health system off guard so much as prompted them to operate on a much larger scale than usual, Hodge said.

“It gets a lot easier when Americans act on their own volition and self-quarantine pursuant to public health directives,” he said. “Most Americans will respond that way.”

The CDC has guidelines on legal authorities governing isolation and quarantine as well as the types of laws and regulations that come into play during a pandemic.

Be seeing you

I Make No Predictions, But Evil Takeover Is Imminent!

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Coronavirus: A Contrived Pandemic? Caused by a Gene Mutation or by a Meteorological Phenomenon? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 30, 2020

I would bet this is another Plum Island/Kenema Hospital research scenario gone bad. gone bad.

How would the US know so soon about the particular virus and it’s epicenter? We knew what the Chinese were researching and/or we were doing it also and/or in partnership with China and/or in competition with China.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/bill-sardi/coronavirus-a-contrived-pandemic-caused-by-a-gene-mutation-or-by-a-meteorological-phenomenon/

By

In October of 2019 a researcher at Johns-Hopkins Center for Health Security predicted 65 million people could die of coronavirus worldwide within 18 months under the right circumstances.

By December 31, China was reporting its first case of a mutated coronavirus infection.  It took only one day for the US Centers for Disease Control to identify a seafood market in Wuhan, China as the epicenter of the outbreak.

A Reuters news report claims the newly mutated coronavirus wasn’t identified until January 10 and hospitals in Wuhan didn’t have testing kits till January 20, with testing prior that date taking 3-5 days because they had to be sent to a laboratory in Beijing.  So how did the CDC all the way in the U.S. so quickly identify Wuhan as the hub of a coronavirus outbreak?

Of interest, Wuhan is the location for China’s Institute of Virology.  Authorities are calling this a coincidence.

One wonders if the current epidemic isn’t actually a contrived and pre-planned reality drill to see how the world would handle such a pandemic?  All the usual suspects participated in the drill planning, pharmaceutical company executives, the World Bank, public health authorities, news media execs, and representatives for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Why did the Johns-Hopkins doctor pick a mutated coronaviral pandemic instead of some other virus?

Wuhan ghost-town

I write this report on January 29, 2020.  The 11-million city of Wuhan, China is gripped by the coronavirus.  Quarantines are in place.  Fear of the spread of the virus is omnipresent.  The weather is wintery.  The temperate chilly, 44° Fahrenheit/7° Celsius.  Cloudy skies will predominate over the next few days.  The UV index in Wuhan goes unreported by news media.  On a scale of 1 (lowest)-10 (highest), the UV index in Wuhan is ~3-4 at the height of the crisis.  Wuhan is 30.5928° North latitude and it is unlikely for its residents to obtain enough sunlight to produce sufficient amounts of vitamin in winter months.

One study (2012) reveals vitamin D deficiency in China is rampant (percentage of vitamin D deficiency among Beijing and Shanghai adults of 69.2%).

Wuhan is now a ghost town. There are photo images of an empty city park, train travelers with warm clothing that blocks any chance of sunlight/skin exposure, video of the empty streets in Wuhan, and more ghost town video footage.  The virus appears to spread internationally by air travel, but not spread outward from destinations of infected travelers.

News reports concede this “deadly” coronavirus is just a new strain of a familiar virus which in the past has been called SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome).  It’s genetic makeup is 96% identical to the coronavirus found in bats.

Viral mutations

Slight changes of the mutation rate can determine whether or not some virus infections are rapidly cleared by the host immune system.

RNA viruses (like the coronavirus) are susceptible to damage from oxidation which can affect their rate of mutation.  This has been demonstrated in mice deficient in the trace mineral selenium.  China is known to be a “low selenium” country by the World Health Organization.

But fast-mutation rates mean any potential epidemic would peter-out due to rapid mutation rates.

RNA viruses (like the coronavirus) have high mutation rates—up to a million times higher than their hosts—and these high rates are correlated with enhanced virulence.  However, their mutation rates are almost disastrously high, and a small increase in mutation rate can cause RNA viruses to go locally extinct. Their mutation rates are said to be an exploitable Achilles’ heel.

Mutation or lack of sunshine vitamin D?

A report published in 2004 in BMC Evolutionary Biology (abridged) said this:

The estimated mutation rates in the SARS-Coronavirus using multiple strategies were not unusual among coronaviruses and moderate compared to those in other RNA viruses. All estimates of mutation rates led to the inference that the SARS-Coronavirus could have been with humans in the spring of 2002 without causing a severe epidemic.  The earliest confirmed case of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) occurred in November, 2002.  The SARS-Coronavirus will likely be with humans for years to come.  On the other hand, if the pathogen (particularly the genes coding for major antigens) evolves rapidly, an effective strategy to prevent transmission of the SARS-CoV must be the top-priority, and an effective vaccine program may be problematic.  In comparison to other coronaviruses, this rate is lower than that in the mouse hepatitis virus, similar to that in the transmissible gastroenteritis virus, but higher than that in the infectious bronchitis virus.  The estimated mutation rate is at the same order of magnitude as in other RNA viruses.  The SARS-CoV is not an unusual coronavirus or RNA virus in terms of its speed of nucleotide changes. One possible scenario is that the SARS-CoV had already infected some people in the spring of 2002 but failed to cause serious epidemics; its spread was however suppressed in the summer (similar to the summer of 2003), and re-emerged around November to cause the epidemic in 2003.

If that isn’t confirmation that coronavirus is always with us but due to geo-meteorological changes (the earth shifting away from the sun in winter) then I don’t know what is.

In 1981 R. Edgar Hope-Simpson proposed that seasonal flu epidemics are associated with a lack of solar radiation in winter months.  John J. Cannell MD convincingly proposes the lack of sunshine vitamin D in winter explains virtually all of the factors involved in seasonal viral epidemics including why these epidemics spread so rapidly in the past despite the lack of modern transportation, why a second-wave of the epidemic so low, why intentional inoculation of healthy individuals does not cause illness in all volunteers, and why flu-related mortality is not significantly affected by vaccination.

Vaccine on the way

A news report says researchers have already produced a vaccine from an isolated “unknown” virus from the first case reported in Hong Kong.  The fastest way to get a vaccine developed and approved is to create an imagined pandemic that elevates the urgency of its development and gets government to cover the R&D cost.  Two companies are said to be developing the world’s first coronavirus vaccines.

Given such a global pandemic from a mutated coronavirus was estimated to cause $570-billion of economic losses should it occur, it would cost just ~$9 billion to provide 30-days of vitamin D pills to 3 billion people in Asia (calculated at 10-cents per pill).

Be seeing you

Plum Island Animal Disease Center – Orient, New York ...

 

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UCLA, Cal State LA To Quarantine Students Who Cannot Prove They Had Measles Vaccination

Posted by M. C. on April 26, 2019

Quarantine CA. Better yet, just stay the hell out all together.

https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2019/04/25/measles-quarantine-ucla-cal-state-los-angeles/

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA/AP) – A quarantine order has been issued for students and staff at two Los Angeles universities who may have been exposed to measles and either have not been vaccinated or can’t verify that they have immunity.

The University of California, Los Angeles, said that as of Wednesday there were 119 students and 8 faculty members under quarantine. The exact number of those quarantined at California State University, Los Angeles, was not officially known.

But CBS2/KCAL9 reporter Leslie Marin said the number at Cal State University, Los Angeles was believed to be about 198 people, including students and staff.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block announced the quarantines in a statement that confirmed one UCLA student has contracted measles.

“We were also informed that the student had attended classes at Franz Hall and Boelter Hall on three days — April 2, 4 and 9 — while contagious. The student
did not enter any other buildings while on campus”, said Block.

So far, “dozens” of such orders have already been issued for students who were in the CSULA campus library on April 11 between the hours of 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., officials said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.

Any student who has been exposed to a confirmed case of measles who could not provide evidence of two doses of measles immunizations or lab verified immunity to measles will be issued a health officer order for quarantine, which mandates the exposed person to remain at their residence…

Be seeing you

Vaccine

 

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