The ACLU, Prior to Covid, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures for Pandemics | Hacker News Reader

The ACLU, Prior to Covid, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures for Pandemics

greenwald.substack.com

78 pointsmiles40 comments

The ACLU is now a political organization aligned with the Democratic party. Even Ira Glasser it’s former, longtime director agrees the ACLU has lost its way.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html

It’s become clear that almost every advocacy organization of any kind is no longer principles based and have taken a political approach because it brings in more money.

Standing up for unpopular views doesn’t excite the wallets (so ACLU, NRA, etc.)

It's true, and and an awful shame to see. I've donated to both the ACLU and been a member of the NRA in the past, and it's very obvious as someone who has received donor requests that both organizations have become captured by the larger political apparatus of a single party.

I'm also genuinely not trying to engage in 'whataboutism' with this comment, it just really sucks to see public advocates for both the first and the second amendment, surrender their own positions in favor of becoming wholly partisan.

"Spreading pandemic is not considered a constitutional right" - Supreme Court

https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/143206991839719424...

If the goal is to suppress the pandemic, then the correct approach would be to shut down MSM and social media like FB, Twitter, etc.

That is how the global mass hysteria commonly known as "covid-19" is spread.

> “The law enforcement approach to public health offers a rationale for the endless suspension of civil liberties,” they explained. Using post-9/11 expansions of state power as its framework, the group explained that “the ‘Global War on Terror' may go on for a generation, but the war on disease will continue until the end of the human race. There will always be a new disease, always the threat of a new pandemic. If that fear justifies the suspension of liberties and the institution of an emergency state, then freedom and the rule of law will be permanently suspended.”

A monk asked master Jōshū "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?" Jōshū answered, "Mu variant"

I wonder if their donor base has shifted? One big donor can obviate many thousands of grass-roots members with a few 10's of millions.

I've donated several times, thought they stood for something.

Similar thing happened with the Sierra Club when they started taking money from big oil. Now they're mostly just anti-nuclear lobbyists.

Point is, once an entity gets a reputation for doing "good", they become so valuable as a business sheepskin than any number of individual donors could ever hop to match.

I was a card carrying member of the ACLU for a decade. Not necessarily because I agreed with them on everything--probably vaccine mandates are something I'd have disagreed with their original stance. But they were an essential part of civil society in how they consistently advocated for civil liberties, even for the benefit of unpopular or unsympathetic causes.

At some point their goals changed when they became an auxiliary arm of the Democratic Party. But why bother to support them when I can just give to the party directly?

Why give any money to corrupt political machines

And now they changed their mind, since 2008. Perhaps it was due to the real nature of a pandemic that killed a large number of people. What is the problem?

Are you saying that, in their original argument, they never considered the scenario where an epidemic killed a large number of people?

I imagine it is easier to deal with in the abstract than confronted in the real thing

I find the argument that my civil liberties are being more impacted if you don’t wear a mask more impactful than the reverse.

But masks work (at least N95) at completely stopping transmission. The covid shot does not. If you have a breakthrough case you’re just as infectious.

So mandate better masks. Incentivize contact tracing and properly following quarantine measures. Governments around the world are picking the most authoritarian, least effective option out of mitigation policies. ACLU should be ashamed supporting it.

> But masks work (at least N95) at completely stopping transmission. The covid shot does not. If you have a breakthrough case you’re just as infectious.

No part of this sentence is true.

Masks (even N95) do not "completely stop transmission". We don't have great evidence that they work at all. The evidence for vaccines, on the other hand, is incredibly strong, and we know they are very effective at preventing transmission -- on the order of 70% against the Delta variant -- and much better than that at preventing severe illness (>90%). If you have a symptomatic breakthrough infection -- a huge if, as this isn't common -- all current evidence is that the vaccines will reduce your overall infectiveness.

This study out of Singapore is an excellent example of the advantages conferred by vaccination on breakthrough infections:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261295v...

They found that vaccination reduced severe disease (>90% reduction) and caused cycle counts to increase faster than in unvaccinated people.

The vaccines work, and work well. Masks...are maybe better than nothing.

N95 masks... the masks that by definition result in a 95% reduction in viral load... you want to argue that those are "MAYBE better than nothing"? You shouldn't even need a study for that one - that's just basic common sense if you understand what an N95 mask is.

I can understand skepticism about cloth masks (where the effect is more a statistical one), or maybe even surgical masks, but to assert that an N95 mask is ineffective is to assert that viral load doesn't matter AT ALL. We're talking a literal 20x difference, here!

https://www.epa.gov/sciencematters/epa-researchers-test-effe... if you really need some sort of citation for this claim.

> N95 masks... the masks that by definition result in a 95% reduction in viral load ... you want to argue that those are "MAYBE better than nothing"?

Yes.

First, that's not what "N95" means. The material in an N95 mask is capable of filtering 95% of 0.3um particles. That's it. It has nothing to do with "viral load". If a virus travels in particles smaller than 0.3um? No good. If the concentration of larger particles in a space is enough that 5% can infect you? Same thing. Theoretical efficiency is not the same as real-world efficiency.

But far more importantly, if you don't fit such a mask properly, then the air will leak around the gaps, and the filtration efficiency of the material is largely irrelevant. Everyone I see on the street wearing (K)N95 masks has massive gaps around their nose and chin. If I can see the gaps from 10 feet away, their fancypants masks aren't doing much of anything except deflecting the air back over their head.

Can a well-fit, correctly worn N95 mask make a difference as PPI? Sure, I don't doubt it. But I guarantee that most people aren't getting close to either criterion.

Illustrative anecdote: I've had really nasty hay fever for my entire life, and I went through a period of trying N95 masks to keep the pollen out whenever I did yard work. Didn't work at all. Want to guess how big pollen is?

> If a virus travels in particles smaller than 0.3um? No good.

What does that have to do with Covid?

> If the concentration of larger particles in a space is enough that 5% can infect you? Same thing.

There is a huge body of evidence that viral load impacts severity, so if 5% of the viral load could infect you, then 20x that was going to put you on a ventilator.

> if you don't fit such a mask properly, then the air will leak around the gaps

There are actual real-world tests based on "average usage". We don't just have to make up our notion of efficiency based on your anecdotes.

> Illustrative anecdote:

I'll admit I prefer the overkill of a P100, but I've taught people how to use one in the course of 5 minutes and their reaction is "wow, this works so well". Maybe the extra filtering makes up for the air gaps, but they're really not hard to get real-world results from.

> What does that have to do with Covid?

The virus travels in saliva particles.

> There is a huge body of evidence that viral load impacts severity

There's actually no evidence for this claim. It's a hypothesis, not a fact. It's essentially impossible to verify the initial viral load of an infectious dose without doing challenge trials, which we haven't done (yet).

> There are actual real-world tests based on "average usage". We don't just have to make up our notion of efficiency based on your anecdotes.

There are no real-world trials of n95 masks and Covid. There were a few studies pre-2020 with n95 masks in hospitals and influenza, SARS and MERS. Two hospital studies involved Covid.

Essentially all of the research concerning masks and respiratory illnesses was summarized by the WHO here:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Figure 4 is the relevant figure. Any study with a 1 in the "respirator" column was conducted with an n95 mask. Overall, they're more effective than the non-respirator masks, but the confidence intervals for nearly all studies overlaps "no effect".

Recent data is pretty clear that the vaccines, while certainly very effective at reducing severity, don't affect transmissibility. Which is logical since transmission occurs before antibody response can be brought to bear.

Masks are barely helpful, preventing 1 or 2 transmissions out of a hundred. Makes a difference in large numbers, so if everyone wore one everywhere, some thousands of transmissions would fail to occur, and thus some lives would be spared.

Mask wearing is mostly ineffective on an individual level, but at least you can see the benefit to society at large. It's small, and should be weighed against downsides with schoolchildren for instance, but as a minor inconvenience for adults I'm all for it.

I mean the article explicitly lays out that their position is based on prior polio, smallpox and Spanish flu epidemics, so they aren’t dealing with the abstract. At all.

Only if you believe those drafting that opinion actually lived through polio, smallpox, and the Spanish flu.

Otherwise, yes, it was absolutely abstract to them. Just because you're dealing with a real event or real data doesn't mean you're not dealing with it in the abstract. Humans react very differently when they're just thinking about something real hard and when they actually experience the thing directly.

"Spreading pandemic is not considered a constitutional right" - Supreme Court

https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/143206991839719424...

People were very eager after the twin towers were bombed to also go against their principles when confronted with reality.

That there is a legacy to this choice should be known and considered for.

Pretty much everything is easier said than done, especially in the sphere that the ACLU operates in. Should we expect them to waffle every time the real-world proves more complicated than their stated principles?

One might alternatively argue that it is much easier to be rational about an abstract position than one that you are actively involved in :(.

Yes, but I think the OP makes a very fair point, and it's impossible to rationalize about events that took place a century ago and graft them into today's situation with all sorts of other unknowns. In particular, some of the 'historical' vaccines were almost entirely about preventing individual infection, whereas we're now facing clearly a very systematic issue and we have an odd problem of ~90% thresholds for achieving certain kinds of tipping points etc. (of course that remains to be seen but theoretically there's an opportunity there).

That said, it doesn't mean that there hasn't been an ideological shift or even some kind of political nuance in the organization.

Both can be true, I'd guess that's at least a little bit the case.

"Spreading pandemic is not considered a constitutional right" Supreme Court

https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/143206991839719424...

Even the vaccinated spread the virus - so what's the point of your statement ?

"very recently, the same group warned of the grave dangers of the very mindset it is now pushing"

That is pure, unadulterated, bullshit.

The original report masterly managed to strike a balance between the public and private rights, between the need to effectively combat this pandemic and the civil rights.

If you can't be bothered to read the full report, feel free to skip directly to the "Recommendations"

Only a delusional person will claim that this report "Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics:

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/privacy/pemic_...

Their biggest donors are all Democrat aligned. Of course they say that kind of thing, it drives donations

"Spreading pandemic is not considered a constitutional right" - Supreme Court

https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/143206991839719424...

So,the position that was drafted without any personal experience of how a pandemic progresses and how to best behave during a pandemic was revised once the people doing the drafting had the chance to actually get some first-person experience with pandemics?

Very nice!

The US isn't Australia and it definitely isn't China. What coercive measures have eroded our civil liberties?

Ah, it’s easy to take positions based on abstract principles when they don’t have real consequences measured in lives. But in the middle of a crisis, when nobody knows what will happen, and everyone is scared and angry, you make the decisions you feel like you have to make. It’s easy to criticize decisions later that were made in a pandemic, or during wartime, etc, isn’t it?

Greenwald's article misrepresents the source: he glosses over that the report was on coercive quarantining enforced by the military (in countries outside America) during SARS, while quoting the lead-in to it.

> he glosses over that the report was on coercive quarantining enforced by the military

https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/civil-liberties-an...

"In this context, Covid-19 vaccine mandates — much like mask mandates — are public health measures necessary to protect people from severe illness and death. They are therefore permissible in many settings where the unvaccinated pose a risk to others, including schools and universities, hospitals, restaurants and bars, workplaces and businesses open to the public."

Their stance is very explicitly about more than just the military.

I'm referring to the original report that he claims is anti-mandatory vaccine - in hindsight, I should have also pointed out that if they were, they surely would have mentioned mandatory vaccinations in public schools and universities at the time

China has enforced coercive quarantining in their SARS-CoV2 response, and these measures have been picked up in the West (via "shelter in place" orders). To their credit, they seem to have successfully contained SARS-CoV2. So maybe the ACLU was proven wrong here.

I’m not sure China is a great example of a country where this type of activity hasn’t harmed civil rights.

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