Barr: Stay-at-home orders are like 'killing the patient' who has cancer

From the April 21 edition of “The Hugh Hewitt Show”:

ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR:  I think, you know, one of the key things that I think is being missed in this whole debate that’s going on now is that we adopted these very strong measures — these are unprecedented burdens on civil liberties right now.

 

And the idea that you have to stay in your house is disturbingly close to house arrest. I’m not saying it wasn’t justified, I’m not saying in some places it might be still justified, but it’s very onerous, as is shutting down your livelihood.

 

So, these are very, very burdensome infringements on civil liberties and we adopted them — you have to remember — for the limited purpose of slowing down the spread, that is bending the curve. We didn’t adopt them as a comprehensive way of dealing with this disease. And we are now seeing that these are bending the curve, and now we have to come up with more targeted approaches.

 

To me this is a little bit like fighting a cancer, which is sometimes cancer is spreading and one of the treatments you can use is chemotherapy to drive it back and localize it and make it more susceptible to surgery or a more targeted thing like radiation or even immunotherapy, but your first thing is to drive it back to a more manageable state.

 

And that’s what we’re doing and have done and the question is: You can’t just keep on feeding the patient chemotherapy and say, “Well, we’re killing the cancer.” Because we’re getting to the point where we’re killing the patient. And now is the time that we have to start looking ahead and checking for a more targeted therapy.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.