Pandemic Preparedness: The Need for a Public Health — Not a Law Enforcement/National Security — Approach
ACLU warning in 2008 about the dangers to rights posed by law enforcement approach.
The spread of a new, deadly strain of avian influenza has raised fears of a potential human pandemic. While the virus is not easily transmissible to humans, were it to mutate to be more highly contagious to or between humans—a possibility whose probability is unknown—an influenza pandemic could occur. Government agencies have an essential role to play in helping to prevent and mitigate epidemics.
Unfortunately, in recent years, policymakers are resorting to law enforcement and national security-oriented measures that not only suppress individual rights unnecessarily, but have proven to be ineffective in stopping the spread of disease and saving lives.
Conflating Public Health with National Security and Law Enforcement Rather than focusing on well-established measures for protecting the lives and health of Americans, policymakers have recently embraced an approach that views public health policy through the prism of national security and law enforcement. This model assumes that we must “trade liberty for security.” As a result, instead of helping individualsand communities through education and provision of health care, today’s pandemic prevention focuses on taking aggressive, coercive actions against those who are sick. People, rather than the disease, become the enemy