Discussions
Forced Quarantines and Vaccinations
Posted by NT77 • 9/11/09 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: flu, quarantine, vaccinations, vaccines
In regard to the swine flu, Massachusetts is working on a "pandemic response bill" which would allow forced quarantine, forced vaccines by health providers, forceful entry into private dwellings, destruction of citizen property and the imposing of fines on citizens for noncompliance.
Iowa is supposed working on forced relocations to quarantine facilities. Other states as listed in the below article are working on orders of their own:
www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=108604
What are your feelings on this? Is this protection of the public or a violation of libertes?
User Comments
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that "Typhoid Mary" gal got forcably quarantined. Was that right or wrong?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon -
We had quarantines back when I was a child. The purpose was to prevent the spread of potentially deadly diseases. It helped in the absence of other ways to accomplish the same end.
I can't speak for others, but in a society in which too many people think of themselves first and others not at all, I think this may not be a bad idea.
I have to laugh when people look back on the '50s as an ideal time in America...you could not homeschool your kid...if your kid didn't show up at school, the truant officer came and got him/her...and YOU got in trouble for not sending the kid to school; to go to school you had to have a DTP booster, show your smallpox vaccination scar and, if you were above a certain age, get another vaccination to boost your immunity---they gave the smallpox vaccination at school; there were quarantines when you had a serious communicable disease---I remember seeing one on the door of a classmate who had diphtheria...he died, BTW.
When you are sitting at the bedside of your dying child, knowing that child is dying because s/he contracted a disease that could have been contained through vaccination and/or quarantine, I think you will be fairly unconcerned about a temporarily suspended civil liberty.
Liberty, like freedom, has its limits... -
As long as the quarantine has a certain time limit (2 years is reasonable) I really don't see what's wrong with it. And forced vaccination shouldn't even be debated except in perhaps individual cases where it might endanger the persons health, in which case permanent quarantine could be a substitute.-
What kind of disease are you talking about that would require a 2 year quarantine???
Most communicable diseases (the kind you can get from being coughed or sneezed on) run their course in two months or less. My classmate's house was quarantined for a month...after he died, they kept it quarantined for another 3 weeks as that germ had incubation period of 21 days. When nobody got sick in that house during those 3 weeks, they knew everyone in the house was clear and the quarantine was lifted.
I can't be vaccinated against smallpox because I suffer from eczema. As a child, while my classmates were being vaccinated in the school cafeteria, I stayed in class with a note from my paediatrician. Should I have been quarantined for life?? -
Molly Mallon was quarantined for three years.
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What was she quarantined for? and when?
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Well, the article is above posted by Agit8r. She was a healthy carrier for Turbeculosis back towards the turn of the 20th Century. Sometimes also known as Typhoid Mary. Bottom line is, you will want some reasonable civil liberties protections just in case, because once they're in, they're vulnerable.
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fortunately, we have treatments for typhoid now. In parts of the world where leperosy still exists, the victims of that disease become isolated from the rest of society on a permanent basis. It is sad, but what else can be done?
I'm sure, however that some are going to say that "government run" healthcare is going to misdiagnose people deliberately, in order to confine them to a concentration camp. Trust me, this theory is bound to come up... if it already hasn't
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With regard to Mary Mallon
it is perhaps worth noting, that civil liberties are those liberties which one enjoys without doing harm to others.
Perhaps more could be done to provide employment in a line of work where she would not be spreading the disease. Unfortunately there was no such safety net at the time -
@Agit8r: There at least needs to be a process and a very detailed one. You can argue that nearly anything is a "harm to others."
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In the case of Mary, she had to work to eat. Her trade was cooking. If she didn't work, she starved. If she did work she sickened people. What is the solution here?
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Eventually they made her work in a new field. And actually, it wasn't that she selfishly continued working when she knew she made people sick, she literally didn't believe she was making people sick.
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regardless of her intentions, what solution presents itself?
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If you are talking about Typhoid Mary, you've not only got your medical conditions conflated, you are advocating draconian steps where they are no longer necessary.
Typhoid and Tuberculosis are very different diseases, caused by very different organisms and cured in very different ways. Except for the treatment resistant strains of TB, people with the disease can continue to interact with others as long as they take their medication, a course of treatment that usually takes between 6 and 12 months. The treatment resistant strains are better treated in a hospital setting rather than at home in quarantine...we have "chest hospitals" all over South Africa for just this purpose.
Typhoid, on the other hand, is caused by a bacterium. It is treatable with antibiotics. Of the 2-3% of typhoid sufferers who become carriers, they are treatable with more antibiotics and sometimes with excision of the gall bladder, where the infection sometimes is harboured. www.medicinenet.com/typhoid_fever/page3.htm#5howis
Typhoid Mary was quarantined because antibiotics had not yet been invented and because she persisted in working as a cook...inadvertently contaminating the food she prepared...after do so. Had she taken up some other form of employment, she would not have been quarantined as she would not have presented a hazard to her community.
It is absolutely pointless to quarantine anyone past the incubation and contagious phases of a disease. It is pointless to quarantine anyone who has something curable or cannot be spread through casual contact or against which the rest of us can be vaccinated.
But liberty, like freedom, is not absolute and sometimes one's liberty or freedom is subject to constraint. -
that is one of the trade-offs of civil society
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@agit8r: In parts of the world where leperosy still exists, the victims of that disease become isolated from the rest of society on a permanent basis. It is sad, but what else can be done?
Actually, leprosy can be cured as well. Like TB, it is caused by a mycobacterium and, also like TB, can be cured by a drug regimen that takes up to a year to complete. Only about 5% of the population is susceptible to leprosy in the first place, and those who contract it cease to be contagious after about 2 weeks of treatment.
Because, prior to antibiotics, leprosy was not curable and it was known to be contagious (although it was not known how unlikely it was to spread), people were quarantined. Now that it is curable, involuntary quarantine is no longer perceived as necessary. Many people who have been disfigured by leprosy, however, prefer to live in the colonies where they are not reviled by the larger...and largely ignorant...society.
Wikipedia has a good article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leprosy -
thanx for educating me. Appearently I speaketh out my @ss
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@agit8er: In the case of Mary, she had to work to eat. Her trade was cooking. If she didn't work, she starved. If she did work she sickened people. What is the solution here?
Actually, she went to work as a laundress for some time, but she made less money than she had made as a cook. Further, she refused to believe that she was a carrier and claimed she had never had typhoid. So, she returned to cooking because she refused to believe/acknowledge that she was a typhoid carrier. Since there were no antibiotics in her day, sickness was much more common than it is now and she could easily write off the sickness in the families that she cooked for as simply coincidence.
But she had been ordered not to work as a cook, and between the lower wages of a laundress and the fact that she did not (want to?) believe she was the cause of her employers sickening, she returned to working as a cook. THAT was what got her quarantined.
Were this to happen today, they would just pump her full of antibiotics and send her back to the kitchen when her blood cultures came back clear.-
my bad. i hadn't read the story in a while.
That does make for an interesting discussion twist however -
Asymptomatic carriers are symptomatic of infectious disease.
In terms of today's medicine Mary Mallone's story may seem irrelevant however in terms of medical science of the time it is highly relevant.
Present and future communicable diseases may or may not be immediately (or even in the long term) treatable by the medical science of the day.
When you have a carrier but no vaccine or treatment then immunisation is the only recourse.
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The issue is much more complicated than the questions being addressed here. For millions of families in the United States, quarantine for several weeks would mean eviction and starvation. Leaving aside the issue of whether we can deny people the means to survive, what about the substantive and procedural issues that grow out of that? For instance, could they in fact be evicted, since eviction would turn them out into the general population and defeat the purpose of the quarantine? Does that mean, then, that landlords' property rights are suspended as well? Or will they be moved to a quarantine location rather than quarantined in their own residences? If so, what happens to their belongings? Again, does the landlord become responsible for storage without pay, or does he simply discard all belongings and, if the person recovers, he starts over with nothing?-
well, it does make for a complicated discussion.
fortunately, the H1N1 virus doesn't seem to be so deadly as to justify such things. We might as well do such every flu season. -
Interesting questions...
If a person is arrested and "quarantined" in jail for several weeks, then released because of insufficient evidence to prosecute, how are those questioned answered?
You see, there is a precedent and I suppose that precedent can be applied to those quarantined. Please be aware that in the first half of the 20th century, quarantine was not all that uncommon...and these issues surely had to be dealt with then, as well. -
... Maybe the expenses of quarantine should be paid by their health insurance.
[knocks on can] Worms... your can is open!
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I am against forced vaccination and quarantine. There's a chance that the flu was manufactured in the first place. There are some who would love to see a major crisis created so Martial Law can be instituted and people forced into camps. I guess if that happened, the (non) healthcare plan would pass with flying colors. -
Will a safe vaccine be ready in time to make it mandatory for this flu season?
And whose definition of safe do we use? -
It sort of resembles Totalitarianism to force vaccination on the whole community. I think it is better to isolate people instead in a safe environment.
I am totally against it, Australia has enough vaccines to vaccinate half the population. They were going to start on the 8th of September, I'm just waiting for the media coverage which will scare the crap out of people and they'll all run in and get a jab.
I consider vaccination to be genocide. An plot by the fascists behind the governments to help eradicate 90% of the worlds population.
To be uninformed about what is actually going on is pretty darned stupid, I can't believe that so many people have not bothered to trace the roots of the flu and the vaccine. -
Flu vaccine has a proven safe record and has been in production for ages now. Every year flu immunisation is different to account for mutations in the flu virus but the principles remain the same. Swine flu is not significantly different from any other flu virus, in terms of immunisation, that humanity has encountered.
No one is proposing blanket immunisation however if you are in one of the groups identified at being at particular risk from Swine Flu then it is advised and sensible that you receive the immunisation.
Flu vaccine are different EVERY year and are proven safe.
* chronic (long-term) lung disease,
* chronic heart disease,
* chronic kidney disease,
* chronic liver disease,
* chronic neurological disease (neurological disorders include motor neurone disease, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease),
* immunosuppression (whether caused by disease or treatment) or
* diabetes mellitus.
Also at risk are:
* patients who have had drug treatment for asthma within the past three years,
* pregnant women,
* people aged 65 and older, and
* young children under five.-
Well, I've got flu vaccinations every year with no problems, but nonetheless there appears to be risks:
www.examiner.com/x-10046-Seattle-Homeschooling-for-Beginners-Examiner~y2009...
www.examiner.com/x-19950-Boston-Disability-Examiner~y2009m8d18-Autism-worri...
Many places are forcing health care workers to have the vaccine, and apparently Greece wants its entire population to have it:
www.infowars.com/mandatory-flu-vaccination-in-greece/
It just seems like an awful big production for a flu which is not any more dangerous than the regular flu, and in which most cases have a brief respiratory illness tending to last three to five days before resolving spontaneously without any specific therapy:
www.myfoxphilly.com/dpp/health/swine_flu/091009_Swine_Flu_Update
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