So you would also say that the government should control the foods we eat also? After all, high sugar foods cause obesity and that has become an “epidemic” in the US, right? How about demanding that no fossil fuels be used? Using fossil fuels pollutes the air we breath and that causes and “epidemic” of breathing problems and cancer, right?
At what point would you suggest the government has gone too far?
Not your fault, because the 'progressives' do their best to confuse everyone by calling everything an 'epidemic'.
None of those supposed problems are really an 'epidemic' in the true sense of the word, since they are non-communicable 'diseases'. Preventing the spread of communicable diseases is the classic government function -- it goes back at least to pulling the handle off the Broad Street pump in 1854, and in a more general sense to the "plague stones" at the time of the Black Death:
. . . while Jack was pointing me out his steeple, we saw a man lying drunk, as he conceived, athwart the road. He said it would be one Hebden, a parishioner, and till then a man of good life; and he accused himself bitterly for an unfaithful shepherd, that had left his flock to follow princes. But I saw it was the plague, and not the beginnings of it neither. They had set out the plague-stone, and the man’s head lay on it.’- Kipling, "A Doctor of Medicine"
‘What’s a plague-stone?’ Dan whispered.
‘When the plague is so hot in a village that the neighbours shut the roads against ’em, people set a hollowed stone, pot, or pan, where such as would purchase victual from outside may lay money and the paper of their wants, and depart. Those that would sell come later — what will a man not do for gain? — snatch the money forth, and leave in exchange such goods as their conscience reckons fair value. I saw a silver groat in the water, and the man’s list of what he would buy was rain-pulped in his wet hand.
‘“My wife! Oh, my wife and babes!” says Jack of a sudden, and makes uphill — I with him.