-
How to End Covid Because It is Already Over
How can we end Covid the public policy disaster? Because Covid the public health disaster is mostly already over and we’re still dying out here.
It is now the third winter of writing about Covid. Topics come and go in journalism; I wrote what I am sure will be my last story about the Afghan war last year, and about the ones in Iraq and Syria, never mind Yemen, a year or two before that. Remember how urgent all that once was, the dictators who were gassing their own people, the Kurds and Yazidis we had to save from genocide at the cost of American lives? Most of it was an exaggeration, much of it an outright lie. The keywords — WMDs — are now shorthand to refer to a decades-long mess that forever harmed our country.
Two winters ago remember the shortages which were going to kill us, the lack of respirators and masks? Remember the urgency with which we erected tent hospitals and dispatched military hospital ships? We shut down schools and stores and lives, two weeks to flatten the curve which in many forms is still going on now three years later. Each variant is announced like a new Marvel supervillain, with new powers. We still are told the source of the virus is unknown but it is clearer and clearer it was created via gain of function research in China funded by the U.S. We were told the vaccines were completely safe even as research suggests those vaccinated might be more susceptible to Omicron than those unvaccinated. Most of it was an exaggeration, much of it an outright lie. The once-conspiracy theories are now shorthand to refer to a mess that forever harmed our country.
Only three years later do we know that as many as half of the hospitalizations “for Covid” turn out to be “with Covid,” admissions for broken arms and liver cancer of people who may also incidentally test positive for Covid. We learn that nearly everyone who died of the virus was elderly and comorbid (only 2.7 percent of Covid deaths in the UK were in people under 65 with no comorbidities; 78 percent who died in American hospitals were obese or significantly overweight) leaving a gaping question about why the society-wide lockdowns even now driving deaths of despair. The Democratic hero governors are gone or no longer nationally important, their populations and tax bases immigrating elsewhere. Our hero teachers are now hated, lazy unionists.
That was then, this is now. Compared with Delta, Omicron infections were half as likely to send people to the hospital. Out of more than 52,000 Omicron cases reviewed, not a single patient went on a ventilator. Covid deaths per capita are higher in New York and New Jersey, among the most locked-down states, than Florida and Texas, among the least. That has to mean something. But we act policy-wise as if it is 2020 again.
I just saw an immediate relative through a bout of Covid. She wondered about a sore throat on Tuesday, had a bit of a cough on Wednesday, spent Thursday on the coach with a fever and then… felt better. She had been fully vaccinated and it worked. After her initial reaction of anger (“I saw life overturned all around me for three years over what turned out to be a bad cold?”) she grew more angry. Did politicians actually know what they were shutting down travel and ending education over? Maybe not two years ago but in 2022 they have no excuse.
In the early days of the AIDs crisis we lost valuable time on theater. In the mid-80’s 60 percent of Americans wanted HIV+ people to carry a card noting their status; one in three said employers should fire employees who had AIDS. Some 21 percent said people with AIDS should be isolated from the rest of society in leper colonies. Pundits demanded gay men stop having “voluntary” sex as a condition for living among the untainted. Politicians encouraged us to worry about using the same public toilet as a gay man, and asked if we could get AIDs from hugging. Only when we dropped all that and focused policy on real science did we start to fight back, to the point where today AIDs is a manageable medical problem, not a crisis.
Tragically, too many felt the more who died of AIDS the better, and played up the deaths as “Judgement Day.” The rest of us, God-fearing, were safe. Homophobia manifested as fear crushed human compassion. It was like hoping the economy went into recession a few years ago, destroying the savings of millions of Americans, so Trump’s chances of reelection would fall. Or the politician hoping the virus infected those at MAGA rallies.
Covid-era politicians bear much responsibility: they exaggerated the efficiency of the vaccine, comparing it to the polio vax, not the yearly influenza vax, in what it is expected to do. Covid is a new way to die, same as we once lived on a planet without AIDs and today we live on a planet with AIDs. The risk of Covid is now part of our daily lives. Surges will happen, a part of life we need to manage, not panic over.
The crisis was overblown from the beginning, kept alive during the election, and then not allowed to whither away once the vaccines were widely available. It represents one of the worst public policy crises of the modern era.
To begin resolving the crisis of public policy, do away with TSA demanding we take off our shoes at the airport. Seriously. We remove footwear today only because some knucklehead failed to explode his shoe bomb 12 years ago. No one was ever harmed with any shoe-borne weapon, or liquid above three ounces for that matter. But we still drag out the airport process doing things that do not matter. Because we still won’t admit our mistakes from the Terror Era and re-assess reality, I’ll be taking off my shoes at the airport until I can no longer travel, cursing as I remind young people so numbed by school lockdown drills to safety theatre that they no longer even care how it all started. Let’s get ahead of all that with Covid.
So let’s start to end the public policy crisis by getting rid of the things we do that have little or no affect. No one has or will catch Covid from an unwashed pen or a paper menu. Plexiglass barriers accomplish nothing. Dirty cloth masks, unsealed around one’s face, are not stopping microscopic viruses. Flashing a cellphone pic of a handwritten vaccine card made out to “McLovin” is not ensuring everyone in the restaurant is vaccinated, especially when we can’t agree if that means one, two, or three shots. Unmasked while seated but masked while standing makes even less sense than shoes-off at the airport. Only four to an elevator but unlimited people shoulder-to-shoulder on buses, subways, and planes is silly. We need to stop calling someone without symptoms and with no effect on their daily lives a “breakthrough infection.” Everything should not be a curveball.
We have to stop focusing on case counts and look at impact. For example, there are a yearly average of over 30 million cases of influenza, but only 34,000 deaths. It is time to acknowledge the difference between infection, which means the virus is simply replicating in one’s body in a struggle the immune system will win in the vaccinated, and infectiousness, which means the virus is replicating in parts of the body in such a way that it could infect other people. Instead we bluntly test, add it all together, and scream Fire!
We must realize it is unhealthy to comply because a) we have become germophobic paranoids or b) it is easier to wear a face diaper than listen to Karen or c) we really have to get to Denver for work and the airline simply will not let us on the plane without a mask and shoe inspection. None of that has anything to do with ending Covid. What it does is leave too many Americans angry, paralyzed with doubt, and ever more distrustful in government. It’s time for a full field view.
We pretend the safety theatre is benign, c’mon, it’s just a mask. We ignore the failure to educate our kids, the teen suicides, the deaths of despair among the body of us as more turn to drugs and alcohol to fill in the dark spaces friendships and socialization used to occupy. In 2021 ER visits for suicide attempts jumped 51 percent for adolescent girls compared to 2019. In any other context all we would be hearing was the media claiming some politician had blood on his hands over that. We are social animals denied the chance to socialize. Like the unadopted puppies at the shelter who soon enough just give up, it is destroying us. The worst part is we are cowed or threatened into participating in our own destruction. We need to stop all the pointless mitigation efforts, acknowledge the damage done, and reclaim our lives.
Unless we take the shot at changing public policy, America will be left as it is now, exploring the edges of what it means to be a failing society. Time to choose.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
A Constitutional Crisis If You Will Keep It: Vax Mandates
Sometimes a thing can be two things at once, one good and one bad. That requires a choice. In a free society that choice is usually best made by the individual affected. If not, then by an open, democratic process. That is not what’s happening with the vax mandate and why the cure may be worse than the disease. Literally and metaphorically.
It is best to be clear: Like many people, I am, by my choice, thrice vaccinated. I understand the Covid vaccine prevents me from getting sick. I am not anti-science. But vax mandates are an unhealthy thing for our democracy and represent a willful effort by government to exert additional control over an already cowed population. There is a direct line between the Patriot Act, mass surveillance, and vax mandates that allows claims it is all for our own good when it is more broadly for our own bad. We are going to have to chose. This is about politics, not medicine anymore.
Whatever you call a country where a central authority makes unilateral decisions which control its peoples’ lives at a granular level, that is now what America has become. In escalation of that new reality, the Biden administration announced a mandate requiring U.S. employers with 100 or more workers to ensure employees are vaccinated for Covid or tested weekly, likely at their own expense. A separate mandate requires employers participating in Medicare or Medicaid to have a fully vaccinated workforce, with no testing alternative.
The first rule alone covers 84 million U.S. workers, or two-thirds of the U.S. workforce. People who do not comply will lose their jobs. Workers who test positive for Covid will be removed from the workplace.
It is critical to understand that these national-level mandates affecting two-thirds of workers (for now; expansion is likely) have been imposed; there was no legislation, no vote, no public debate, no public record of who supports and who opposes them. It all begs the question of if the threat is so obvious, why has this needed to be so coercive and sneaky? The Biden administration disingenuously created the mandate through the back door of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a sub-office inside the Department of Labor otherwise created to ensure workplace safety. The mandate places an unvaccinated worker (not a diseased worker) in the same category as frayed electrical cords and wet floors, a workplace hazard. OSHA, under threats of penalty, outsources enforcement (i.e., firing the unvaxxed worker) to the conscripted employer. Fines are up to $136,532 for employers who willfully violate standards. OSHA will carry out inspections and a whistleblower hotline is available to rat out your boss.
The Biden administration is also requiring Americans abroad seeking to return to the U.S. to either be vaccinated or test negative, the first time in history something other than citizenship has been a criteria for a citizen’s reentry. The decision to allow an American Citizen to return to his own country, a right seen as guaranteed by the Constitution, has been outsourced to a local airline employee at a foreign airport in contrivance of any due process. That last bit is what’s new; even during the Ebola outbreak screening was done by American government officials at American airports. Not any more. By outsourcing enforcement to an airline clerk in Paris, as with outsourcing censorship to Twitter, Biden disposes of Constitutional 5A protections.
All of this has been justified as a legitimate response to an emergency, albeit an “emergency” now heading into its second year and one which has been essentially put to rest in many other democracies, such as in Scandinavia, with much lower social costs. The problem is that what may seem like a reasonable step in today’s emergency will have a hangover effect when invoked as precedent in less dire circumstances for even more authoritarian rules. The impulse to map restrictive rules on larger and larger populations is also to be expected. In simpler terms, power seized by governments rarely is relinquished, even long after the urgency has passed. That’s why you are still taking your shoes off at the airport. It’s why after “two weeks to flatten the curve” we are talking about vax mandates and the government controlling who can work, travel, go to school. Like terrorism, who can ever say when Covid has gone away forever?
There is some hope already visible. In his dissent on an earlier case in which the Court upheld a state-level healthcare worker vax mandate, Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed cynicism about what he views as the government’s protracted suspension of liberties due to the pandemic. “I accept that what we said 11 months ago remains true today — that [s]temming the spread of COVID–19 qualifies as ‘a compelling interest.’ At the same time, I would acknowledge that this interest cannot qualify as such forever.”
The government’s history of such liberties taken with our liberty is poor. Think back to the powers taken by post-9/11 presidents to address that emergency. The result was ongoing mass surveillance of Americans in America (4A), a global kidnapping and torture program (all laws of decency and human dignity. 5A as Guantanamo is still open to house American permanent residents,) near-endless wars started without Congressional approval (War Powers Act, Article I, Section 8) and drone killings of American citizens abroad (5A.)
If it was still about medicine we would be testing workers and travelers for chlamydia and tuberculosis, deadly and infectious diseases, and making a yearly flu shot mandatory (38 million people in America got the flu last year.) If we shared so much concern for our fellow citizens that we force them to vax, it is important to ask why we don’t show similar concern for their general lack of access to medical care for other life threatening things. Why only Covid? Why not malnutrition, an underlying cause of a third of children’s deaths, 2.6 million every year?
Biden’s assertion of control over who can work and who cannot is clearly overreach when well-more than half of all Americans are already vaccinated. It is also unconstitutional. Cases already filed will inevitably reach the Supreme Court. The cases will likely hang on the hook of states’ rights, or the 14A equal protections clause preventing discrimination based on health status, for example, workers with AIDS. Another hook might be the government violating the 1A by taking it upon itself to adjudicate which religious objections qualify and which it claims are bogus.
But the cases filed will not be at their heart about Covid, or medicine at all, but about our democracy. Any notion that public health demands the government take for itself the power to dictate who can work, or which Americans have the right of return, misses the point. Covid should not be the driving force of life in America. A truly healthy society is one where freedom is its core value, not fear.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Propaganda and the Coronavirus
“Um, is it Colonel Vindman in the Russian Tea room with the coronavirus?”“Very funny. Now everyone settle down. Welcome back to Propaganda and the Death of Media 101 in case you’re in the wrong class, and its, um, March 15, 2024. Now we were discussing the role of propaganda and the media in trying to influence the re-election of Donald Trump by tying his leadership to a global pandemic. Propaganda in these cases seeks to diminish people’s view of a leader’s competence. The ultimate goal is to get you to vote him out.
For those of you in the back holding up those tattered Bernie signs, God rest his soul, let’s start with the question of whether the media engaged in propaganda at all. Contrast the sense of panic in 2020 whipped into place with how things played out in 2009 under Obama. The first cases of the swine flu, H1N1, appeared in April 2009. By the time Obama finally declared a national emergency that fall, the CDC reported 50 million Americans, one in six people, had been infected and 10,000 Americans had died. In the early months of the disease, Obama had no Secretary of Health and Human Services or appointees in any of the Department’s 19 key posts. No Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, no Surgeon General, no CDC Director. The gap at CDC was particularly important, as in the early days of the crisis only they could test for the virus; states weren’t enabled until later. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, not a medical doctor, lead the federal effort.
The first real H1N1 cases appeared in Mexico. The border was not sealed, Mexicans were not forbidden to enter the U.S. Though CDC recommended against travel there, the primary danger cited was kidnapping for ransom. Yet 66 percent of Americans, supported by the media, thought the president was protecting them. Some 4,000 Americans were dead before a vaccine was first distributed.
The emergency proclamation it took Obama seven months to declare was issued by Trump within 30 days of the current virus being found abroad. He announced a temporary suspension of entry into the U.S. of foreign nationals who pose a risk for the transmission of the coronavirus (CNN criticized “the travel ban could stigmatize countries and ethnicities.”) And yes, Trump encouraged everyone to wash their hands.
Anybody here remember the media freaking out over Obama’s initial response, which was hand washing was pretty much what was needed? Anyone who did the reading find evidence of national panic throughout the crisis? No. Why did the media cover essentially the identical story so very differently for two presidents? The question is the answer.
Look at the timing in 2020; the crisis came when the media decided it was time for a crisis. Though the virus dominated headlines in Asia since mid-January, American media first relegated the story to the business news. In late February the main “Trump” story was Russiagate II, the revelation (which quickly fell apart) the Russians were meddling again in the election. The Democratic debate at the end of February invoked Putin many times. The virus barely came up.
Then the NYT sent up the Bat Signal for the new crisis on February 26, the day after the Democratic debate, with an article titled “Let’s Call It Trumpvirus” (subtlety is not required for propaganda.) An effort was born overnight to blame Trump personally for the virus, and essentially declare his chances of reelection done. The critical change was not anything to do with the virus itself, simply with the decision by the media to elevate the story from the business section to the front page. Even a week after that, with American sanity in a tailspin, only two Americans had died, and about half the known U.S. cases arrived with the evacuees from Japan. Of course the numbers quickly went up (that’s why we use the expression “going viral” for your Instagram blowups, kids) but imagine what a graph of actual cases would look like versus a graph measuring panic.
You’ll see in your textbooks another example which shows how propaganda works, the reporting of initial problems with the CDC coronavirus test kits. One typical headline claimed “The U.S. Badly Bungled Coronavirus Testing.” But the problems were old news almost as the stories were written; 15,000 testing kits were released within 48 hours of that story with plans to send out an additional 50,000. Each kit can test 700-800 patient samples.
The follow-on stories screamed about Trump funding cuts to the CDC, most of which were actually only proposed. Then the stories were merged — Trump cut CDC funding and thus not enough kits were available. Not only were both pieces largely untrue individually (few cuts were made, kits were available), the merging of the two was grossly false. Instead of examining these things for lessons learned in the midst of an unfolding crisis, the media treated them as new bits to mock Trump with, like late night comedians trolling the news for material for their monologue.
No room was left for people making errors in novel decisions under time pressure, just the jump to “Trump incompetence” instead of doing the real work of looking into the questions. The problem with the testing kits was a highly technical one involving chemical reagents and factory contamination. CDC is a massive institution. Who if anyone there made any “bungled” decisions? Would they have likely made a better decision with different funding? If so, then Congress can act and drop some money on that office. If not, move on, there is work to do. It is how the media acts when they seek to fix the blame, not the problem.
The propaganda surrounding how the government initially handled the coronavirus was also obvious in the false “who is in charge” question the media asked. The vice president was given the role heading up the task force. This is the kind of thing VPs do, bring gravitas, make sure a whole of government approach has the bureaucratic firepower it needs, and so on. The propaganda instead hyper-focused on Mike Pence’s “disbelief in science,” itself more of a chanted mantra than anything established by fact. For “proof” the stories settled on Pence supposedly creating an HIV epidemic while governor of Indiana. The reality is much different. Pence took office opposed to needle exchanges. When dirty needles shared among opioid users in rural Scott County, Indiana were linked to 71 cases of HIV transmission, Pence responded to the new information (sad to see people die, but 71 deaths is all it was and many would have died from their drugs soon enough) by changing his policy and authorizing needle exchange in Scott and four other counties. The reality seems much closer to seeing an ideological stance changed by science than the opposite.
—
Pence said at the time “I’m going to put the lives of the people of Indiana first. It’s a commitment to law and order, but it’s a commitment to compassion.”
—Meanwhile, the media largely ignored those Pence chose for the taskforce. One was Dr. Deborah Birx, a career medical professional nominated by Obama in 2014 as the U.S. global AIDS coordinator. She also served as head of the global HIV/AIDS division at CDC, was an immunology researcher at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and an Army colonel. You want to inspire confidence you profile Dr. Brix; you want to sow discord you misrepresent Mike Pence’s decisions years ago.
There’s so many more examples, but our class time is short. Here are a few.
You can report on the elimination of Obama’s pandemic czar but leave out that the position was just a coordination job on the National Security Council with no real power. It sounds scary (one outlet called it sabotage) to see that job go, but in fact the coordination duties within NSC were reassigned to others.
You can focus on every coronavirus case as proof efforts are failing while ignoring providing perspective by reminding 12,000 people died, with over 13 million infected, from the regular influenza (the one with the vaccine) between October 2019 and February 2020.
You can focus on time will take to develop a full-on vaccine and ignore the treatments already now in human testing trials.
You can purposefully confuse accelerating public health measures already underway with America’s lack of universal individual health care. We have plenty of the former, not enough of the latter. But the pandemic is not a solid argument for the latter as it is a problem of public health policy. That’s why even countries with good, free care systems are suffering the virus. Medicare for All would not have changed anything in 2020.
You can cover the virus as you did Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Everyone was gonna die there until they didn’t. You can follow the now-standard Trump propaganda template: say he won’t do enough, then say what he does isn’t being done fast enough, predict everything will collapse (with Katrina references) and then move on to a new crisis as the reality of the response takes hold.
You can report on panic selling on Wall Street, or explain how global supply chain problems are not caused by the virus, but by traders’ reaction to the unknowns of the virus. China’s factories closed because the government enforced social isolation, not because the workers were dead. Soon enough Apple products flowed back into our greedy hands, and the stock market found its way back to a new normal.
You can report store closings, but not their reopenings. By March 1 Starbucks had reopened 85 percent of its stores in China. Apple, over 50 percent. You can emphasize how many Chinese factories were closed in February, or report on their reopenings in March.
You can misrepresent the use of words like hoax to make the president appear weak.
You can ignore the drop off in cases inside China. Only a few days after the first cases appeared in the U.S., new ones inside China dropped to 200.
You can avoid reporting how viruses follow a bell curve. Case counts first rise quickly, the virus claims the “easy” deaths among the elderly, and then environmental factors (viruses must live inside a host; they have limited life outside on surfaces`, typically less and less as temperatures climb. This is why you can’t catch HIV from a toilet seat) and public health measures kick in. Treatment emerges and the virus fades. You can explain to calm people where they are in what looks like a 10-12 week cycle to or you can ignore it to stoke fear of the unknown.
The bell curve template is clearly illustrated by a look-back to how HIV/AIDS went from a massive public health crisis in America to a manageable problem. As the virus became known, panic took hold. False reporting outran reality. But the bell curve took over; the virus’ transmission became well understood, better testing protocols developed, excellent preventive medicines became available, and treatment regimes now exist which ensure long lives in remission. Knowns displace unknowns. None of this is to minimize the suffering enroute to the current state, but to show there is an established path even for a virus far more deadly than corona.
Class concluded.
“Hey professor, is all this gonna be on the test?”
“No, but it may influence an election. And don’t forget to wash your hands before lunch, something is going around.”
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Is Forced Quarantine for Ebola Legal?
New York and New Jersey this week instituted mandatory confinement for certain people exposed to ebola. Illinois announced its own mandatory quarantine, and Florida has instituted a home-quarantine version.Is it legal for a state (or the federal) government to detain and quarantine you against your will for health reasons? Yes. Has this sort of thing been done before? Yes. Will it be effective? No. Is it just a political ploy to garner votes from a panicked public? Oh my yes.
Is it legal for a state (or the federal) government to detain and quarantine you against your will for health reasons?Yes. The federal government derives its authority for isolation and quarantine from the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. Under the Public Health Service Act, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to take measures to prevent the entry and spread of communicable diseases.
The authority for carrying out these measures is been delegated to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Under 42 Code of Federal Regulations parts 70 and 71, CDC is authorized to apprehend, detain, and examine people arriving to the United States and traveling between states who are suspected of carrying communicable diseases.
Though the paranoid-a-sphere rediscovers these provisions on a regular basis and makes much of them, the basic idea of the government forcibly quarantining people for the sake of public health goes back into the 19th century.
That said, the power to detain and quarantine often is left to the states, and both New York and New Jersey law provide for it. New York allows the decision to be challenged in a magistrate court; New Jersey does not have a similar law, though technically any form of detention can be broadly challenged under habeas corpus. But good luck with that– the Florida Supreme Court laid down the precedent in saying “The constitutional guarantees of life, liberty and property, of which a person cannot be deprived without due process of law, do not limit the exercise of the police power of the State to preserve the public health so long as that power is reasonably and fairly exercised and not abused.”
Has this sort of thing been done before?Yes. The Florida precedent case cited above dealt with forced quarantine of a tuberculous patient in 1952.
Just recently in Dallas, Texas, after her boyfriend was diagnosed as the first ebola case in the United States, Louise Troh and her family were asked not to leave their home. When Troh tried to leave anyway, a Dallas judge issued a confinement order, forcing a quarantine on Troh and her family. Police stationed outside of the family’s home enforced the order.
In 2007, a 27-year-old man was forcibly placed in a Phoenix hospital ward reserved for sick prisoners. The man suffered from a deadly strain of tuberculosis known as XDR-TB. Doctors say he is virtually untreatable. He has been forced to live in a hospital cell in complete isolation.
Though never implemented, in 1985 at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a majority of Americans favored quarantine of patients, with 48 percent approving of identity cards for those who tested HIV-positive, and 15 percent of Americans even supporting tattooing those with AIDS to mark them as “dangerous.”
Further back in America’s history are multiple examples of forced quarantine, including Hawaiian leper colonies, and the isolated TB wards and Ellis Island medical isolations of the 19th century.
The record is not pretty, but the record exists.
Will it be effective for ebola?No. The New York and New Jersey quarantine laws at present only apply to a) health care workers b) returning from African “hot zone” countries through c) only two airports, JFK and Newark who d) had contact with ebola. That’s a very select group, chosen largely because New York’s sole ebola patient fit that exact profile. Persons such as regular travelers who fit the same profile,or persons who just flew internationally with the profiled individuals, are not included.
In addition, the New York and New Jersey plans seem to rely 100 percent on individuals who fit the profile self-identifying themselves for the mandatory quarantine. Anyone who wished to avoid it, especially a health professional who knew s/he was not an active carrier based on clearly identifiable and well-known symptoms such as a high fever, could just dummy up at the airport. Alternately, s/he could route flights to land somewhere else and take the bus home to Manhattan.
What does happen when a healthcare worker enters this quarantine system? There is only one example in New Jersey so far, and it is not a pretty one. Kaci Hickox, returning from volunteer work in Sierra Leone, was detained against her will for seven hours at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday before being forcibly transferred to a local hospital, escorted by eight police cars, where she will be held for an unspecified period of time. Hickox did not have a fever when brought to the hospital and has tested negative for ebola, yet is inside the system now and those things do not appear to matter.
Quarantining actually infectious people, who may indeed be a danger to public health is one thing. But like taking off our shoes and other security theatre that followed 9/11, the quarantine plan seems designed more for show than any hint of practicality.
Is it just a political ploy to garner votes from a panicked public?Oh my yes. All of the state governors who pushed the plan through without the endorsement of the CDC or New York’s mayor are in election battles. The governors of New York, Illinois and Florida are up for reelection in about a week, and New Jersey governor Chris Christie is famously testing the waters for a possible 2016 presidential run. New York’s mayor is not up for reelection for years.
Fear-mongering works; ask any politician who has beaten the drum of “9/11, 9/11, 9/11” since, well, 9/11. People are scared, mostly based on ignorance fanned by media who themselves seek to profit from fear.
That sort of disease seems more dangerous in the long run than a handful of ebola patients.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Buy Peter’s Books on Amazon!
