by Dish Staff
Three American missionaries who worked with Ebola patients in Liberia were immediately placed under quarantine when they returned to the US Sunday. Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley mull over the legality of such a move:
The legal theorist Jennifer Elsea has drawn parallels between the rights of the quarantined and those of American citizens who have been deemed “enemy combatants.” Both medically quarantined subjects and detained terrorist suspects are examples, Elsea’s work suggests, of how the rights of citizens can be put on hold for indefinite periods of time. If being held in a state of quarantine is legally comparable to being held as a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, is quarantine something we should trust to protect us, or is it something we actually need protection from?
The A.C.L.U. has argued that trading liberty for security in the event of a pandemic is not only undesirable but also constitutionally dangerous and unnecessary. … In 2007, Barry Steinhardt , an A.C.L.U. spokesman, emphasized that, “in the vast majority of cases, sick individuals are the first to want proper medical attention and need no encouragement or state coercion to voluntarily isolate themselves.” As we have seen in the cases of Andrew Speaker and the West African victims of Ebola, however, such rational and altruistic responses to involuntary quarantine are by no means universal. Active resistance does occur, and when it does it poses extraordinary problems of control.
The Dish 