Doug Ireland* - March 03, 2005

In a column published today, Pinkerton suggests that we may be close to the day when a quarantine of people with AIDS is necessary. This sort of talk has not been heard in this country since the first years of the pandemic in the '80s, when ignorance about HIV and AIDS was widespread. Back then, a host of right-wingers, like William F. Buckley and Pat Buchanan, were calling for everything from tatooing the buttocks of the HIV-infected to quarantine for them.

Pinkerton's column is a throwback to those dark days. He argues that:

"The issue here isn't anybody's sexuality, but rather everybody's wellbeing. So the Q-word in question is "quarantine." Once upon a time, the US government routinely quarantined people with infectious diseases. Which is to say, back then, those who "declined to participate" in tracing disease-outbreaks were forced to participate. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) still operates eight quarantine stations. So if you plan on bringing a horse into the US, for example, you must plan on leaving it quarantined for 60 days, because authorities fear letting in the dreaded screwworm.

'So it made sense for Julie Gerberding, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to publish an article last fall in American Medical News in which she declared, "Good old-fashioned isolation and quarantine have a special role to play in any pandemic." It made sense, of course, but it was politically incorrect as all get-out. Indeed, Gerberding was quick to add: "But the imposition of such strident disease-containment methods raises a number of ethical questions for an era in which civil rights and individual liberties are taken even more seriously than they were in Typhoid Mary's time." And in fact, there's been no serious effort to revive quarantining as a public-health measure. Nor should there be. Let's hope that a combination of public-spiritedness and public health can keep this epidemic from infecting our civil liberties, too.

"However, in the Third World , the situation may prove to be different. When confronted by SARS Chinese were ruthlessly efficient -- which is to say, ruthlessly effective at saving lives -- by quarantining SARS cases...Quarantining might yet make a comeback, liked or not. In the Third World, especially Africa, AIDS has never been under control...Will AIDS continue to eat up lives and resources? Maybe. But it's hard to imagine that political correctness, as applied to basic issues of disease mitigation, will be allowed to run roughshod over societies and governments. At some point, enough will be enough; leaders will conclude that the commonweal can't be held hostage to a few crazies..."

Pinkerton is a clever fellow, which makes his argument all the more insidious and persuasive to the uninformed. His "I'm against quaranting, but..." approach is designed to protect him against attacks for advocating a totalitarian, extremist solution while he is putting the issue of quarantine for people with AIDS back on the table. Moreover, in his column, Pinkerton targets two groups who are not much in favor in the U.S. these days: gay people, and people in the Third World. Quarantine, he appears to be saying, may one day be okay for fags and wogs.

But what Pinkerton is also really saying here is that government should stop putting money into providing drugs to fight AIDS--and he makes a particularly vociferous assault on gay people as spreaders of the disease, even though every statistic shows that the HIV virus these days is overwhelmingly spread by heterosexuals, and that the pandemic knows no gender boundaries. Here's Pinkerton again on the rationale for cutting AIDS-fighting budgets, in which he attacks

"...the idea that 'the government,' aka, all of us, will subsidize self-destructive behavior forever. The rich might always have the resources to treat and detox and rehab themselves out of the consequences of most forms of crazy behavior, but not every malady can be treated with money. And as for the rest of us, we will just have to live within the rules of prudence and common sense, behaviorally and fiscally."

Pinkerton spouts this frightening line from his perch in D.C. as a Fellow at the New America Foundation, a very establishment operation whose board chairman is James Fallows (a former Jimmy Carter speechwriter who's been editor of U.S. News & World Report and is now the star writer for The Atlantic), and whose board of directors, in addition to a gaggle of high-tech sector business honchos, includes such supposedly civilized folks as Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria (a regular on ABC's This Week), the Council on Foreign Relations' Walter Russell Mead, and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.

If the quarantine of AIDS patients is being discussed and taken seriously as an idea in such toney circles, it is time to be very frightened indeed. Moreover, Pinkerton is well plugged in to the conservative policy wonks who feed ideas to the Republicans (as Pinkerton has done for years).

The notion that people who contract the HIV virus should be slashed from receiving government-subsidized drugs, which Pinkerton peddles in this column, is, I suspect, the harbinger of a new argument which will soon be making its way into the discourse of some of those conservatives now close to the center of power. Combine this sort of thinking with the wave of politicized religiosity in which our country is now drowning -- blaming the victims of the disease for being infected, rather than suspecting that government's failure to educate its citizenry about AIDS, while instead preaching that condoms don't work and that sexual abstinence is the only way to avoid infection, has something to do with the rising infection rates -- and you have a potent prescription for cutting back on all sorts of already-underfunded AIDS programs. Dangerous stuff, I'd say.

*Reproduced with permission of the author, Doug Ireland.

His blog DIRELAND can be reached by going to: http://direland.typepad.com/direland

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