print“I’m a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person. This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I’ve cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing.”
So said the patient “with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous he is under the first U.S. government-ordered quarantine since 1963,” on returning from a transatlantic trip to celebrate his wedding. The trip took him from Atlanta to Europe—Greece, Italy, the Czech Republic, France—and back to Atlanta via Canada and New York. By the man’s telling, he came back not because he realized he had exposed others to a deadly, highly infectious airborne disease, but because “he was afraid that if he did not get back to the U.S., he would not get the treatment he needed to survive.”
“Health officials said the man had been advised not to fly and knew he could expose others when he boarded the jets from Atlanta to Paris, and later from Prague to Montreal… He knew he had a form of tuberculosis and that it was resistant to first-line drugs.” Apparently he was also told to wear a mask. That too he ignored. If Andrew Speaker—that is the patient’s name—is as smart as he professes, he ought to have known not to expose people without their consent to any TB, much less to a strain associated with a 50 percent mortality rate.
Speaker returned to North America via Canada, driving into the US, a fact that demonstrates consciousness of guilt: He avoided American airlines, as he had been placed on a “no-fly alert,” which, it transpires, was overlooked at the border crossing. I suspect this case is akin, legally, to an individual infected with HIV not informing his sexual partners of his condition.
I’m trying to think of a libertarian argument against coercively confining a man who knowingly and intentionally uses his body as a lethal weapon against unsuspecting innocents. I can’t come up with one. Can you? Another libertarian has expressed a preference for “home confinement with an electronic monitor. This would seem to strike the balance between protecting his liberty interests and the safety of the public.” I like home confinement, only I really do not believe the authorities acted illiberally up until now: they gave the patient the goods (the info), and left it up to him to comply voluntarily. Andrew Speaker, on the other hand, ignored the information and acted recklessly. Should be given a second strike? If he strikes out again, someone could die—especially individuals with a low T cell count (suppressed immunity). Armed and dangerous is how he ought to be regarded. Would an electronic monitor provide ample warning in the event he violated the quarantine? By the time the authorities locate the quarantine violator, he may well have infected a host of people.
In the meantime, Diane Sawyer, who grills her subjects only in the sense Larry King interviews his, has elicited Speaker’s story. It’s a maze of contradictions and dissembling, and is accompanied suspiciously with “sexy” poses of Innocent Andy and a woman with a blond head the shape of Paris Hilton’s, a forlorn look, and big implants. His new wife, presumably. The fact that this is an educated man—a lawyer, no less—doesn’t help his case.