Quarantine power and the CDC website
In the February 13, 2020 episode, guest Jeffrey Tucker told Bob Zadek that the Centers for Disease Control maintains a website laying out “very specific plans for quarantining any element of the US population that the president wants to do,” and that this authority “all comes from the executive department.” Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020) Tucker said that if the agency wanted to quarantine people it could take them from their homes and place them in a camp, with “no rights, no lawyers, no recourse,” and that resistance could be met with being shot on the spot. He described as “extremely weird” the agency’s stated penalty structure: a person who resists successfully and escapes would, according to the CDC, be fined $1,000. Tucker said he would gladly pay that sum to avoid being taken with his family and friends to a government camp.
Zadek framed the discussion around the absence of constitutional text on quarantine. He said there is “almost nothing in the Constitution dealing with the power of quarantine,” which in his account means looking elsewhere for the rules, including the Fourth Amendment and the question of being locked up without due process. He traced quarantine practice to colonial America and to the French phrase cordon sanitaire, describing government tying a rope around the perimeter of areas it wished to separate from the population, and noted that in colonial times quarantine was exercised heavily on ships because ships carried disease. Zadek said he was astonished to learn there is no Supreme Court precedent and no binding authority on what due process rights apply to a person determined by public health officials to be subject to quarantine.
Tucker agreed that the laws have existed for decades and said they were used in World War II, adding that government would use the power again. He said the CDC website “tells you exactly everything you need to know about quarantine power,” and that a person has “literally no rights in the case of a pandemic disease.” He extended the claim beyond pandemics, saying the CDC could order everyone in Western Massachusetts rounded up for reasons of public safety with no legal recourse. Zadek responded that he was astonished at how little legal protection citizens have if the government makes a mistake — quarantining a person, an apartment building, or a city — and whether the Supreme Court can even step into that decision.
Health theater and the TSA parallel
Zadek drew a parallel between the CDC’s role and the Transportation Security Administration. After Tucker described a handheld distance thermometer used in China to sort the infected from the uninfected — a device Tucker called pseudo-science, noting that a person who ran to catch a bus would register a hot forehead — Zadek said he smiled because he flashed to the TSA. He called the tool “health theater,” and said the parallel is undeniable between what he described as a 95% failure rate at TSA and a 95% probable failure rate with the thermometer, both under the guise of protecting the public, both denying citizens freedom, and both resting on mysterious tools while giving the government the appearance of doing something. Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020)
Tucker’s broader argument was that quarantine powers are easy to abuse and will be abused. He cited the Diamond Princess, where 400 Americans were quarantined on a ship with sick people for two weeks and could not leave, and said the release was botched so that passengers were to be sent to Tokyo for two more weeks of quarantine. He said the threat of quarantine power being used in the United States was much greater at the time of the broadcast than when he wrote his article on January 27. He also said that government cannot know who is sick and who is not, and that the tests are widely recognized as ridiculous.
Fatality-rate calculation and the case against panic
Tucker attributed much of his information to George Dehner, a health economist and medical history economist at the University of Michigan. According to Tucker, Dehner says the coronavirus may not be very contagious and may not be all that deadly, that the incubation period is believed to be about five days based on data from other coronaviruses, and that the fatality rate is calculated by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of known cases. Tucker said the rate appeared to be about 3%, roughly like the 1918 flu pandemic, but that if there were 100,000 Chinese citizens with mild infections not counted, the rate would fall to about 0.02%, identical to seasonal flu deaths. He called it an extreme reaction to quarantine whole towns and have a nationwide panic and have the World Health Organization freak out when the disease is, as far as was known, no more or less serious than the flu. Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020)
Tucker also said the data coming from China is unreliable, describing a handheld thermometer tool used there and saying the false diagnoses with such devices are infamous. He predicted that within about twelve months nobody would be talking about the coronavirus and that it would prove a flash in the pan. Zadek’s framing was that if the data is exaggerated, the reaction is exaggerated, and the loss of liberty is for no good reason — a chain effect he said the episode would explain.
Historical precedent and racial targeting
Zadek raised the history of using disease fears to give outlet to racial bias, citing the Japanese internment during World War II and, before that, incidents at the end of the nineteenth century involving the internment of Chinese nationals for fears of disease. He said there were then-current press anecdotes about Uber and Lyft drivers being circumspect about picking up Asians, and described the atmosphere as bordering on hysteria. Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020)
Tucker said there would have been no forcing of Jews into ghettos in World War II if quarantine powers had not existed, saying Nazi powers were entirely based on the idea of quarantine, and that this led to greater sickness, rounding up in cattle cars, and extermination through many means including gas chambers. He said it all began with the quarantine of people based on demographics, a government power, and that there should never have been any government quarantine, including the one applied to the Japanese in the United States in that same period, all based on demographics. He said the idea that government can determine whether a person is sick, how sick, the risk of infection, the likelihood of death, and the conditions for keeping oneself and others safe is “utterly crazy.”
The 9/11 parallel and surrendered liberty
Zadek opened the episode by comparing the government and media reaction to the coronavirus with the aftermath of 9/11. He said 9/11 was sudden, people were frightened, and within minutes draconian federal statutes were passed without examination, which he said must have been written beforehand and waiting for the appropriate crisis. He called it perhaps the single most immediate mass surrender of freedom in favor of the government in American history, and noted that those laws have not been diminished or repealed. Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020)
Tucker agreed that the plans for everything that happened after 9/11 were laid out five or ten years earlier and that 9/11 was just the catalyst. He said that after 9/11 airport security was nationalized and internal controls followed, and that internal passports now exist such that a person would not be able to board a domestic flight without a passport or a driver’s license giving special permission. He said this happened while people were sleeping and he saw no public protest. He warned that if the population were panicked enough by weeks of non-stop cable news and presidential speeches about an existential threat, people would turn in their neighbors, and that this could happen in two weeks.
Zadek said he did not fear that quarantine would be used indiscriminately, but was concerned that the episode had the earmarks of recent events that resulted in expanded government power and lost liberty under the political cover of an existential crisis people fear emotionally rather than on data. He described looking to government for protection as a state of mind that is a blank check to the government, and said the show was an invitation to citizens to be alert for government seizing additional power under the political cover of the coronavirus.
Across episodes
The CDC appears in two episodes in the excerpts. In the February 13, 2020 episode, Jeffrey Tucker and Bob Zadek discuss the agency’s published quarantine plans and the absence of legal recourse for those subject to them. In the August 14, 2020 episode, guest host Charlie Deist asks Ron Jones about his sources for studying the 1918 pandemic, and Jones names the CDC as one partner, alongside the University of Michigan and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in what he calls the largest digital database in the world for the 1918–1919 pandemic influenza in the United States. Back to School: A History Lesson from the 1918 Pandemic (2020) The excerpts show no development in the show’s treatment of the agency between the earlier and later episode: the first treats it as a locus of emergency power, the second as a data source, and no speaker in either excerpt responds to the other episode’s characterization.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the CDC was founded, where it is headquartered, or what its statutory authority rests on beyond Tucker’s and Zadek’s characterizations. They do not name any statute, regulation, or court case establishing or limiting quarantine power, and Zadek states that there is no Supreme Court precedent on the due process rights of quarantined persons. The excerpts do not give the title or field of George Dehner beyond Tucker’s description of him as a health economist and medical history economist at the University of Michigan, and they do not identify the article by title beyond Zadek’s reference to “Must Government Save Us from the Coronavirus?” The August 14 excerpt ends mid-sentence in Deist’s question about approaching the data with clear eyes, and the February 13 excerpts break off mid-sentence as well.