AIDS Quarantines: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

CDC Model Bill Would Give Health Authorities Sweeping Powers

news analysis by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Reprinted from Zenger's Newsmagazine, January 2002 • [advanced copy]

[all rights reserved]

The conventional wisdom was that the idea of quarantining or isolating
people with AIDS or HIV was pretty definitively laid to rest in 1986
and 1988, when California voters overwhelmingly defeated three
initiatives — two sponsored by political nutcase Lyndon LaRouche and
one by far-Right Congressmember William Dannemeyer — that would have
extended the authoritarian powers of public-health officials over
readily communicable diseases like tuberculosis and smallpox to AIDS
and HIV.

But it may be that the political defeat of these bills only gave
people with AIDS and "HIV-positive" diagnoses a 15-year reprieve from
quarantine. Now public-health officials like Dr. Jeffrey Klausner,
head of the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Prevention Unit of the San
Francisco Department of Health, and Queer writers like Andrew Webb are
talking up tough new measures to "isolate" diagnosed HIV-positives —
and two controversial San Francisco AIDS activists, David Pasquarelli
and Michael Petrelis, are facing felony charges of stalking and making
so-called "terrorist threats" against Dr. Klausner and other local
officials and reporters in an attempt to hold Dr. Klausner publicly
responsible for his views.

Worse, a new "Model State Emergency Health Powers Act," drafted by
attorney Lawrence Gostin for the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and the Center for Law and the Public's Health at
Georgetown and Johns Hopkins Universities, would vastly expand the
ability of public-health officials to order the quarantine or
isolation of "any person" during a so-called "public health
emergency" declared by a state governor.

Though the draft of the Model Act, released October 23, 2001, is
supposedly aimed at giving state health officials the capability to
deal with terrorist releases of anthrax or smallpox, it provides
governors power to declare health emergencies "if the Governor finds
an occurrence or imminent threat of an illness or health condition,
caused by bioterrorism, epidemic or pandemic disease, or novel and
highly fatal infectious agents or biological toxins."

Under the sweeping provisions of the Model Act, during a "public
health emergency" health department officials would have broad powers
to force individuals to be vaccinated, tested or treated for disease
against their will; draft doctors and other health professionals to
perform the involuntary vaccinations, tests and treatments;
commandeer or destroy private property; and share a great deal of
otherwise confidential health information on individuals with police
and other law-enforcement agencies.

Quarantining AIDS Patients, Dissidents

On November 7, two officials from an organization called the Health
Privacy Project — director Janlori Goldman and senior counsel Joanne
L. Hustead — wrote Gostin a letter highly critical of his draft Model
Act.

"Is it your intention to permit state authorities to declare public
health emergencies and quarantine people with HIV or hepatitis?" they
asked Gostin. "Even if a state governor did not use the power vested
in him or her to declare a public health emergency and quarantine
people with HIV or hepatitis, this act puts into place mandatory
names-based reporting for epidemics, presumably including at least
HIV and hepatitis, a controversial proposition indeed."

What Goldman and Hustead didn't know was that Gostin and co-author M.
Gregg Bloche had already published an article, "A Health System Primed
to Fail," in the November 4 Los Angeles Times that made it clear just
how extensive the reach of the proposed Model Act was intended to be.
The article essentially said that the "golden age" of public health
politics in the U.S., from the 18th century to the end of World War
II, was one in which federal, state and local government gave public-
health officials broad and unilateral authority to combat whatever
disease threats they defined.

Gostin and Bloche contrasted this to a modern age in which what they
see as an unreasonable concern for individual rights and "patient
autonomy," as well as a complacency based on the success of prior
public-health measures and antibiotic treatments, block doctors and
other public-health officials from being able to take the kinds
of "robust public-health measures" their forebears had. Though Bloche
and Gostin did not write the Times' subhead to their article, "Choice
trumps common good," it accurately sums up their argument that
people's autonomy in making their own medical decisions needs to be
drastically reduced, especially in cases of so-called "public health
emergencies."

The Bloche/Gostin article leaves no doubt that the draft Model Act is
fully intended to apply to AIDS. Not only is AIDS specifically
mentioned as one of the five potential health threats which Bloche
and Gostin claim demonstrate the need for the proposed legislation
(along with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, West Nile Virus,
smallpox and Ebola), but they specifically cite the public-health
response to AIDS in the 1980's and 1990's as a negative example of a
policy in which individuals' rights were allowed to trump "the common
good" as expressed by authoritarian measures taken by public-health
officials: "AIDS activists battled successfully for public-policy
responses that intruded minimally on personal autonomy and privacy.
The AIDS paradigm for coping with a public health crisis treated
government as more of a threat than a solution."

Anyone who remembers the campaigns for the AIDS initiatives in 1986
and 1988 will recognize these as exactly the same arguments LaRouche
and Dannemeyer were making then. Had the provisions of Gostin's Model
Act been in effect during the 1980's and 1990's, they could have been
used to accomplish what LaRouche and Dannemeyer tried to do by
initiative, including requiring all members of so-called "at-risk"
populations for HIV to present themselves for HIV antibody testing,
requiring name-based reporting of all HIV antibody test results,
requiring all reported "HIV-positives" to present themselves for
mandatory "treatment," and quarantining or isolating "HIV-positives"
who repeatedly engaged in "unprotected" sex.

The relevant passages of the Model Act (soon to be introduced as
proposed legislation in California, Massachusetts and several other
states) regarding quarantine and isolation are set forth in Article V,
"Special Powers During State of Public Health Emergency: Control of
Persons." Section 501, "Control of Individuals," reads: "During a
state of public health emergency, the public health authority shall
use every available means to prevent the transmission of infectious
disease and to ensure that all cases of infectious disease are
subject to proper control and treatment."

Section 502, "Mandatory Medical Examinations," reads in part: "The
public health authority [meaning a state or local health department]
may exercise, for such period as the state of public health emergency
exists, the following emergency powers over persons … to compel a
person to submit to a physical examination and/or testing as
necessary to diagnose or treat the person … [or] to compel a person
to be vaccinated and/or treated for an infectious disease."

What is most chilling about the Model Act is that nowhere in its
provisions on quarantine and isolation is there any requirement that
the persons being quarantined or isolated actually have a disease.
Indeed, Section 503, "Isolation and Quarantine," specifically states
that "any person" may be quarantined. This raises the spectre that
under the declaration of a "public health emergency" (which every
large city in California has made with regard to HIV and AIDS),
persons could be quarantined or isolated not for being sick
themselves, but for expressing different scientific points of view
about the causes of diseases or the efficacy of treatments for them.

Already the AIDS establishment routinely defines dissent from the
HIV/AIDS model as "dangerous" and "a threat to public health" in that
it allegedly encourages others to practice behaviors likely to spread
HIV. The comments of veteran AIDS researcher Dr. Mathilde Krim on the
August 24, 2001 episode of ABC-TV's 20/20 that people like
alternative AIDS activist Christine Maggiore of Alive & Well/Los
Angeles are "putting lives in jeopardy and … draw[ing] people to the
conclusion that they can throw away their condoms and stop taking
medications" are typical.

Under the provisions of Gostin's Model Act, people could be vulnerable
to quarantine or isolation not because they had AIDS or HIV, but
merely because they were on record as publicly stating that HIV is
harmless and AIDS is not an infectious disease. Opponents of
vaccination and other people involved in alternative health education
could also be quarantined as "threats to the public health."

San Francisco's Political Prisoners?

Though the Model Act isn't in place yet in California, the possibility
that people could be incarcerated for expressing their views on health
issues in a way the mainstream medical community regards as a "threat"
became real in San Francisco on November 28, 2001. The story had
really begun four weeks earlier, on October 30, when David
Pasquarelli and Todd Swindell of ACT UP San Francisco (which rejects
the HIV/AIDS model and the use of toxic chemotherapies to treat HIV)
and independent activist Michael Petrelis sent out a series of e-
mails containing the home phone numbers of Dr. Jeffrey Klausner and
Eileen Shields of the San Francisco Department of Health; Cynthia
Laird, news editor of the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco's leading
Queer publication; and reporters for San Francisco's two major daily
papers, the Chronicle and the Examiner.

The activists were upset over a campaign Dr. Klausner was waging to
get America Online to scroll continuous warning messages on all their
chat rooms for Gay men that unprotected sex spreads syphilis and HIV.
Dr. Klausner said he'd started the campaign because syphilis cases
among Gay and Bisexual men in San Francisco had risen from 10 in 1998
to 47 in 2000 and 89 in the first nine months of 2001. According to
Dr. Klausner, 19 percent of the Gay and Bisexual men diagnosed with
syphilis in San Francisco had met their partners through Internet
chat rooms — and 89 percent of those who had used chat rooms had used
AOL. (This amounts to 17 people who used chat rooms and 15 who used
AOL.)

Pasquarelli, Petrelis and Swindell saw this as an attempt to make an
epidemiological mountain out of a molehill. They noted that America
Online had offered to post occasional safer-sex warnings to their Gay
male chat rooms, but Dr. Klausner had said this was not good enough.
"There should be continuous messages until the risk is abated, in the
same way [as] there are warnings on tobacco products or alcohol
products," Dr. Klausner told the Bay Area Reporter — a curious
borrowing of the radical Right's metaphor comparing homosexuality to
alcoholism as behavior-based sins one can recover from
through "reparative therapy."

They targeted reporters as well as health officials because they
believed that instead of investigating Dr. Klausner's numbers, they
had simply and uncritically reported his hysterical conclusion that
San Francisco faced a major increase of Gay men with syphilis and HIV.

The activists also pointed to an article that appeared in the November
2001 issue of the Washington Monthly. Written by Andrew Webb, a
free-lance Gay writer from San Diego, the piece hinted that Dr.
Klausner had "raised the possibility of quarantining those [`HIV-
positives'] who cannot control their infectivity — e.g., those
barebackers who've infected 20 different people and still refuse to
use condoms." Webb also claimed that Dr. Klausner "has suggested a
number of measures, some coercive, which he thinks would slow the
increase of new HIV infections among Gay men. Among them: closing sex
clubs and adult bookstores; enforcing no-sex ordinances in bars and
clubs; enforcing no-drug policies in bars and clubs; and Internet-
based outreach and education, particularly in chat rooms where many
Gay men meet new sexual partners."

Webb's article did not quote Dr. Klausner directly, and much of the
repressive agenda mentioned in the piece seemed to be not Klausner's
but Webb's own. The intent of his article was basically to suggest
that "mainstream society" offer Gay men a Faustian bargain: give them
"legalization of same-sex marriage, domestic partnership benefits and
other measures that would allow Gays to have culturally supported,
monogamous relationships" in return for the Queer community's
cooperation in suppressing the sexually rambunctious, non-monogamous
Gay men who are supposedly spreading HIV.

Nonetheless, Petrelis, Pasquarelli and other alternative AIDS
activists in San Francisco took Webb's article as proof that Dr.
Klausner was set on imposing AIDS quarantines and demanded that the
city fire him. The response from openly Gay San Francisco Supervisors
Tom Ammiano and Mark Leno was to defend Klausner and ridicule the
quarantine allegations as "far-fetched." The response from the Health
Department and the media was to go to court and seek restraining
orders against the activists, using a strategy mainstream AIDS groups
like the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and Project Inform had already
used successfully against ACT UP San Francisco.

On November 28, when Pasquarelli and Petrelis went to court for what
they thought was just going to be a civil hearing, they were arrested
on the premises by San Francisco police and charged with "stalking and
making terrorist threats" against the health officials and reporters
whose home phone numbers they had published. Though they made an odd
pair of co-defendants — unlike Pasquarelli, Petrelis not only believes
HIV causes AIDS but takes the HIV chemotherapies himself — they were
both given similar charges and held on $500,000 bail, which neither
has been able to raise.

ACT UP San Francisco had already made many enemies among the city's
mainstream AIDS activists and political progressives, both for their
aggressive demonstration tactics — which have included dumping used
cat litter, throwing vitamin pills and spraying Silly String on
public and private AIDS officials — and their contacts with
conservative Congressmembers to seek the defunding of local AIDS
agencies. Even before the arrests, on November 15, a group of
mainstream San Francisco AIDS-war veterans calling themselves "AIDS
Activists Against Violence and Lies" had published an open letter in
the Bay Area Reporter calling for the prosecution of Pasquarelli and
Petrelis and saying their activities had intimidated AIDS and STD
prevention workers.

After the arrests, Gabriel Rotello — who has argued in magazine
articles in The Nation and his book Sexual Ecology that Gay men must
go beyond safer-sex campaigns and actively discourage non-monogamous
sexual lifestyles to stop the spread of HIV — crowed in a December 3
Los Angeles Times article "that the arrests of Michael Petrelis and
David Pasquarelli may mark a turning point in the faltering effort to
prevent AIDS among Gay men." Though Rotello questioned the San
Francisco district attorney's use of the term "terrorist" in making
the charges, he made it clear that the real reason he thought
Pasquarelli and Petrelis should be prosecuted was for raising public
doubts about the cause of AIDS and the efficacy of condoms to prevent
AIDS and chemotherapies to treat it.

Rotello isn't the only HIV/AIDS believer who is calling for the
prosecution of AIDS dissidents for their views. On May 1, 2000 the
Toronto Globe and Mail quoted Dr. Mark Wainberg — AIDS researcher at
McGill University, president of the International AIDS Society and one
of three co-chairs of the 2000 International AIDS Conference in
Durban, South Africa — as calling for the prosecution of UC Berkeley
professor Peter Duesberg and other scientists and lay people who
raise public doubts as to whether HIV causes AIDS. "If we could
succeed and lock a couple of these guys up, I guarantee you the HIV-
denier movement would die pretty darned quickly," Dr. Wainberg told
the Canadian Association for AIDS Research convention in Montreal.

David Pasquarelli and Michael Petrelis have since become the "couple
of these guys" Dr. Wainberg wanted to see locked up. And if
California and other states adopt the proposed Model State Emergency
Health Powers Act, there may be many more to join them.


DISSIDENT and SAINT
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DissidentSaint

AIDS Dissident Scientific and Alternative Health Restoration Faith-
based Social Non-violent Direct Action and Educational Exchange.