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It depends on whether you consider liberty, self ownership and free contracts between consenting adults to be basic human rights.

Eroding liberty by restricting free association would have certainly been considered a violation of rights by the folks that listed them in the Constitution.

In fact, they put it first.



And yet, quarantine of infected people/places has a long, long history in the US. Weird.


Great point!

Like when we put barbed wire up in Chinatown, San Francisco in 1900 after allowing all the white people to leave? [1]

Or when we incarcerated 30,000 women in WWI because they may be "unclean" and held them even after their mandatory STD tests came back negative? [1]

Or what we did to immigrant Russian Jews in 1892? [2]

Did you know that up until 2009 we banned HIV positive people from entering the U.S.? [2]

Yes, of course the U.S. has a long history of quarantine. We also have a long history of abusing those powers for racist and political reasons.

The PA Supreme Court, at least, agrees. [3]

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2014/10/30/3601204...

[2] https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/cure-worse-dise...

[3] https://www.alston.com/en/insights/publications/2020/09/cons...




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