The CDCs New Quarantine Rule Could Violate Civil Liberties
The CDC’s New Quarantine Rule Could Violate Civil Liberties
Ed Young
The Atlantic
On August 15th, with little fanfare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took steps to improve its ability to deal with infectious outbreaks. The agency proposed a new rule that would expand its powers to screen, test, and quarantine people traveling into or within the United States, in the event of a crisis like the historic Ebola outbreak of 2014.
“They’re giving themselves the benefit of the doubt,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the UPMC Center for Health Security and a co-author of a recent paper criticizing the proposed rule. “I don’t worry about the CDC. I worry about people above them making them do things they don’t want to do because they’ve given themselves these broad powers. Those powers will make their jobs easier, until they don’t.”
It is already authorized to detain people suspected of carrying diseases like plague, Ebola, and (somewhat improbably) smallpox. But the new rule does away with a formal list. It extends the same powers to any “quarantinable communicable disease,” and uses wider range of symptoms (from a list that federal agents can update as the need arises) for defining “ill” people.
There are good reasons behind these semantic expansions. The current system was enshrined in 1944 and needs an update in the face of the diseases that have arisen since. For example, the existing list of warning symptoms doesn’t cover many important signs of known diseases like Ebola and MERS. Meanwhile, new and unknown illnesses are emerging all the time. “The CDC trying to equip itself with sufficient flexibility to respond to diseases we’ve never heard of, in a way where it doesn’t have to revisit these rules every few years,” says James Hodge Jr, a professor of public-health law and ethics at Arizona State University. “I’m supportive of that.”
You'll be sorry when the zombies come.
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