Problem
Early advocates of public health in the USA, such as Mitchell Prudden (1849-1924) and Hermann Biggs (1859-1923), who was general medical officer of the city of New York's (NY, USA) Department of Health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were unabashed as they defended the legitimacy of coercion in the face of public health threats. "[E]verything", said Biggs when talking about efforts to curtail tuberculosis, "which is detrimental to health or dangerous to life, under the freest interpretation, is regarded as coming within the province of the Health Department. So broad is the construction of the law that everything which improperly or unnecessarily interferes with the comfort or enjoyment of life, as well as those things which are, strictly speaking, detrimental to health or dangerous to life, may become the subject of action on the part of the Board of Health." Looking back almost a century later, Laurie Garrett commented in her book, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, that, "[i]t was a declaration of war, not just against tuberculosis but against any group or individual who stood in the way of Public Health or the sanitarians' Hygeia"
How have some of the ideas mentioned in the article played out over the last few years of the COVID-19 pandemic? Are there people who think their rights are/were being infringed upon by the government? Were you surprised to learn these issues are not new in our country? Do you think the government has been justified in their actions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic? Why or why not?