Action: Good Bills – Removing Forced Quarantine, Protecting Medical Freedom

Good bills to support in the last minute.  We recommend to email your legislators in support of these bills and add momentum to get them passed.

1. Removing the government’s power to “force quarantine”.

SB116 will make quarantine voluntary.

I still have many constitutional concerns with this section of law.  But the error was made in the past, not in this current bill. Like always, we need to always ask, where’s the constitutional authority to even conduct “voluntary quarantines”?  It doesn’t exist.

That said, the law currently authorizes physically forced quarantines in emergencies, so this is a step in the right direction.  Even though I’d prefer removing the quarantine program all together, and would suggest that, this is a positive.

The crossed out section shows you the horrible tyrannical power to exercise “physical control” over you in current code. The underlined section is the new law that would make it voluntary.

I still say if we’re going to fix it, let’s remove this program completely, but we can save that for another day.

It’s also an issue that once you volunteer, there’s a complicated process to “withdraw consent”.  And if you don’t do it properly, then you could still be subject to consequences.

So while we support this general direction, let’s follow up on this one and eventually get rid of this.

2. Giving more freedom to alternative health treatments

One big part of medical tyranny has been the medical establishment insisting that “their way is the only way”.  And often taking legal action against “alternative” health methods, regardless of how much their methods actually help others.  When alternative methods actually heal problems and mainstream medicine only addresses symptoms, the establishment has great motivation to label “alternative” methods as dangerous.  Remove this assumption from law is a good move for freedom.

SB171 has a lot of words, but this section summarizes it well.

This clarifies that a doctor is not guilty of “unprofessional conduct” by deviating from “medical norms”.  The bill goes on to further define many scenarios that can no longer be labeled as dangerous.  Doctors might need to review the process if they’re going to leverage the benefits of this.  It read that essentially as long as they can defend it’s best for their patients they can do it.

This section protects a pharmacist, so they can recommend against filling a prescription. This is a great move for freedom of speech, even though this is theoretically already a right under a doctor’s Hippocratic oath to do no harm.

This section shows that “alternative” care cannot be considered a breach of duty to care for the patient.

This section states the process with which a doctor must follow to protect themselves under the law.  Not a big deal I guess, it just says you made an attempt to diagnose and understand possible side effects of the treatment.  This is what doctors would do anyway under their Hippocratic oath.

Action Items to support these bills.

Contact your rep to email about these bills from our Contact Your Reps page at www.DefendingUtah.org/ContactYourRep

A simple statement of support is sufficient.