In this time of The Virus, spreading faster than the disease are the restrictions and government trespasses designed to combat it. The latest examples are healthcare workers sharing Wuhan-flu-positive patients’ addresses with the police and a Michigan judge authorizing the arrest of people suspected of harboring the virus if law enforcement deems such action necessary.
Dropping a Dime on the Diseased
Long considered an imperative in America, medical privacy is going out the window in certain places thanks to virus hysteria. As LifeSite reports:
Health care workers in a handful of American states are sharing with police the addresses of those who test positive for the virus.
So-called “information sharing” is currently underway in Massachusetts, Alabama, Florida, as well as in parts of North Carolina, ABC News reports.
The information sharing is being done in the name of “keeping officers and EMTs safe,” and works by states directing their local health boards to share addresses of those who have tested positive for the virus.
Florida’s State Emergency Operations Center recently announced that they are sharing the addresses of positive case coronavirus patients with first responders.
However, as the ABC report notes, concerns have been raised by both health and privacy activists that health agencies sharing information with the police might cause some to forgo getting tested or treated for coronavirus.
Did You Just Blow Your Nose, Sir?
In one Michigan county, whether or not they have ways of making you talk, they may have ways of making you cough. Regardless, a judge in Kent County has authorized the arrest of those suspected of carrying the Wuhan virus if the police deem it necessary. As LifeSite also reports, in a different piece:
First highlighted by radio host Steve Gruber, Kent County Chief Circuit Judge Mark Trusock’s April 6 order declares that any citizen deemed to be a “carrier and health threat” can be “involuntarily detained by a peace officer, transported to and detained in an Involuntary Isolation Facility selected by the Health Officer for observation, testing, and/or treatment.”
The individual could then be held for at least three days to confirm he or she is “without a fever of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit for at least 72 consecutive hours (without use of fever reducing medication) and/or is otherwise non-symptomatic and meets the CDC criteria for release from isolation.”
According to the Great Lakes Justice Center, Trusock based the order on state law that authorizes the confinement of individuals who a “court has reasonable cause to believe” is a public health threat. But whereas that law requires a court to assess specific cases before making an arrest, Trusock gave police and health officials blanket permission to decide who may be a threat.
In fairness, Michigan station 13 on Your Side says the story has another side, as presented in the two-minute video below.
Obviously, a contagion is present, people are currently very scared, and it’s understandable that certain mitigation measures would be taken. It also doesn’t help that we have lunkheads such as the people in the short videos below, who threatened to purposely spread the Wuhan virus.
(It turns out that one of the above individuals was perpetrating a hoax, and the other might have been as well.)
Yet something else doesn’t help: that many of our “leaders” and other public officials are often behaving irrationally and tyrannically. It certainly doesn’t inspire confidence, for example, when
• Governor Phil Murphy (D-N.J.) says that he didn’t even consider the Constitution when issuing his lockdown orders and that the Bill of Rights — which he took an oath to uphold — is “above my pay grade.”
• a Mississippi police officer, while raiding a drive-in church service, tells a pastor that his “rights are suspended.”
• police in Raleigh, North Carolina, respond to a “re-open the state” protest by tweeting “Protesting is a non-essential activity” and then, when called on it, defend themselves by saying they were just following orders.
• governors such as Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.) — called “The Worst Governor in America” — prohibit elective procedures such as joint replacements but allow prenatal infanticide (aka abortion) to continue, shut down churches but keep liquor stores and marijuana dispensaries open, and ban the sale of food-plant seeds but continue selling lottery tickets (which bring the states revenue).
• governors apply the same virus-driven lockdown rules to relatively unaffected rural areas that they do to big-city hot spots because they’re afraid of being called “racist.”
• statist politicians use the virus scare to advance a hard-left agenda via trillion-dollar “stimulus” packages, with Majority Whip James Clyburn (D., S.C.) telling his fellow travelers that such a bill is “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.”
All rational people accept sober and reasonable mitigation measures. But such won’t be instituted when judgments are colored by political ambition, power lust, prejudices, political correctness, panicked minds, and constitutional ignorance.
If politicians want people to take their orders seriously, they have to reflect seriousness. We also need to seriously consider that if we’re willing to kill our republic along with the virus, we’re already sicker than any pathogen could make us.
Photo: Sergei Fyss/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
