Jacqueline Passey, one of my fellow Life, Liberty & Property Bloggers, asks this question:
in light of an impending Bird Flu pandemic, what, if any, is the appropriate role of the state in epidemic control? Should it be involved with immunizations, be able to institute and enforce quarantines, etc.? Does personal liberty include the right to go around infecting others with a deadly disease?
I wrote about a similar issue in August in connection with the “mandatory” evacuation of New Orleans in advance of Hurricane Katrina. The question then was what powers does/should the government have in the wake of a natural disaster or threat to the public. In a different form, that is the same question we’d be faced within if forced to deal with a Bird Flu (or Smallpox, or anything for that matter) pandemic. In that post I said:
Ayn Rand once said that “[n]o exact, objective morality can be prescribed for an issue where a man’s life is endangered. While the point she made does not correspond precisely with the question I asked, I think the response to the question is similar. In a true disaster scenario, such as the one New Orleans is faced with, there is no institution outside of government that can maintain the basic threads of social order that are needed to keep civilization functioning.
And that is exactly the point. At their base, governments were instituted to keep civilization functioning and to protect their citizens from external threats. Does it really matter if that threat comes from an Al Qaeda suicide bomber or a mutated form of the Bird Flu ? On some level, they both pose the same type of threat to the safety of citizens. Arguably, in fact, a pandemic poses an even greater threat than a suicide bomber since it could potentially lead to the same breakdown in the social order that we saw in the wake of Hurricane Katrina when the state, local, and federal governments all failed in their basic tasks.
The question of what the government should and should not do in response to a true public health threat is as much a question for epidemiologists as it is for political philosophers. The first question to answer is what would work best to meet the threat that we would be facing. As I pointed out just last week, quarantine is probably not an effective way to deal with a disease like the flu. Widespread vaccination with the most effective vaccine possible would do more to stop the spread of Bird Flu than using the 82nd Airborne to quarantine the City of Boston after the disease has already reached epidemic proportions. And widespread vaccination is precisely the kind of thing that the government, properly run, can do effectively.
Other libertarians may disagree, but I consider government to be an essential actor in protecting citizens from communicable diseases just as it is an essential actor in protecting citizens from foreign enemies.
Finally, to answer Jackie’s last question, no, personal freedom does not include the right to infect others with a deadly disease. The threat that such a person would pose to innocent people in an industrialized society can hardly be understated. Potentially, one person infected with a contagious, virtually untreatable disease (i.e., Smallpox) walking around a major American city could cause more damage than Typhoid Mary ever did. Suggesting that government does not have the authority to quarantine such persons under any circumstances is the same kind of unrealistic head-in-the-sand libertarianism that says that seems to be against every foreign policy move America has made since the French Revolution.
Personally, I think that the Bird Flu is being overhyped. To call a pandemic “impending” is, I think, a bit extreme and buys into the sensationalizing that this story has gotten from the MSM. If I’m wrong, though, I hope that the government is allowed to take the steps it needs to take to protect its citizens from this threat.
