Arresting Contagion: Science, Policy, & Conflicts over Animal Disease Control

In my research for "Dragonslayers: Six Presidents and their War with the Swamp," I came across this book: "Arresting Contagion: Science, Policy, & Conflicts over Animal Disease Control." It is a very well researched academic book by Alan Olmstead, who is known as a solid agricultural historian, and Paul Rhode, and econ prof.

Animal disease epidemics were growing in the 1800s. Many states passed livestock sanitary laws and blocked interstate commerce. This incited claims they were using health issues to protect their domestic competition. Some areas such as New Orleans continued to ship contaminated beef.

The response to this was a public policy that involved getting state support to agree to transfer power to the feds. According to the authors, "these changes occurred earlier in animal health than in many other policy areas."

In June 1879 Congress empowered the National Board of Health to impose national quarantines where local rules were lacking.

Who was driving this? Elizabeth Sanders in "Roots of Reform" showed that politically mobilized farmers were pushing for federal regulation in the late 1800s.

The key agency was the Bureau of Animal Industry in 1884. It represented a "landmark in the history of federal regulation & the rise of science policy." The shift came with an outbreak of CBPP (Contageous Bovine Pleurophnemonia) that started in the midwest, and which threated to infect all the nation's distribution channels. Chicago fought the state of Illinois; Illinois fought the feds. Livestock owners fought them all.

In response, Congress gave the BAI widespread powers that "established the precedents for later eradication efforts. State-federal agreements were hammered out that deputized BAI agents to exercise police powers within states." By 1892 CHBB was eradicated.

Once the BAI was given more power, states jumped in to take control themselves before the feds did. Governors of Iowa, Wisconsin, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas all barred cattle from Illinois based n the CHPP infection there. Finally Illinois passed a bill requiring the governor to accept the USDA's rules.

The significance of this involves some of the court cases used to justify BAI. Many people here won't like this, but I'm just the messenger: In Lawton v. Steele (152 U.S. 136, March 6, 1894, the Supreme Court held that state police power "is universally conceded to include everything essential to the public safety, health, and morals, and to justify the destruction or abatement . . . [of a public nuisance or] the slaughter of diseased cattle; the destruction of decayed or unwholesome food."

In 1976, Congress passed its first quarantine legislation that allowed fed agents to aid state and local officials in a quarantine if requested.

What to make of all this? It appears in the broader court ruling that in matters of public health, the gubment has full rein to do what it wants; that states short-circuited the feds by acting pre-emptively. In short, it appears to me that the laws are already on the books and that the Supreme Court has already ruled in a case related to the Vax. We'll see if some brilliant lawyers on the side of freedom can show significant differences between the livestock epidemics and human epidemics.

Interesting, I already took my two phizer shots and won’t be taking any more. Will this be the hill I die on? I wonder.

Well, even if the government already has some established right to mandate things in the interest of public health, there is still plenty of room to argue that what the government mandates must ACTUALLY be in the interest of public health. They couldn’t, for example simply claim firearms are a threat to “public health” and just ban them under such a spurious excuse. Similarly, mandating a medication that they haven’t fully tested and demonstrated will abate the threat to public health, and a medication they have openly admitted doesn’t actually stop transmission of this virus, well, that’s something one could easily argue is not in the public interest, despite what the government claims, and therefore is not within their power to mandate.

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