Dupage Policy Journal

State Rep. Deborah Conroy (D-Villa Park) wants to create concentration camps for Illinois residents who refuse to take COVID-19 vaccines.

Her bill would allow the state to "isolate or quarantine persons who are unable or unwilling to receive vaccines, medications, or other treatments." 

That could include segregating non-COVID vaccinated Illinoisans from COVID vaccinated residents, and more.

Conroy’s bill would give local health departments and state politicians formal legal authority to fully control the behavior of any individuals who don't follow their COVID-19 restrictions and rules, including keeping people isolated and under police guard. 

Local health departments can "adopt any rules" necessary, according to its text.

“Provides that the Department of Public Health, the Department of Human Services, and the Department of Children and Family Services may adopt any rules necessary to implement the Act,” the bill reads.

“Creates the Access to Public Health Data Act. Provides that the Department of Public Health, the Department of Human Services, and the Department of Children and Family Services shall, at the request of a local health department in Illinois, make any and all public health data related to residents of that local health department's jurisdiction available to that local health department for the purposes of preventing or controlling disease, injury, or disability,” the bill reads.

The bill gives local public health departments powers including keeping individuals isolated with guards.

The Illinois House Human Services Committee will hear HB 4640 on Feb. 2 at 9 a.m. It faces heavy opposition with more than 3,000 opposed.

The timing of the legislation is odd, given recent studies by the CDC and Johns Hopkins University reporting natural immunity provides more protection against COVID-19 than the COVID vaccines.

Illinois already has some of the strictest protocols surrounding COVID-19 of any of the states.

The local health department component of the bill has already been played out in Australia.

Australia has enacted quarantine compounds complete with guards who are ordered to do whatever it takes to keep occupants isolated.

One such camp in Howard Springs captured three escapees late last year – one who was arrested after jumping a fence at the camp. He later tested tested negative of COVID-19.

The Howard Springs site has a reputation that is bad and getting worse.

That site can hold up to 2,000 people.

One Australian who was forced into the Howard Springs camp was simply moving across the country to escape lockdowns in large cities when she was scooped up into such a camp without having caught COVID-19.

“You feel like you’re in prison. You feel like you’ve done something wrong, it’s inhumane what they’re doing. You are so small, they just overpower you. And you’re literally nothing. It’s like ‘you do what we say, or you’re in trouble, we’ll lock you up for longer’. Yeah, they were even threatening me that if I was to do this again, “we will extend your time in here,” the detainee, Hayley Hodgson, 26, who never tested positive over her 14-day imprisonment at the camp said, according to Unheard.com.

The condition Hodgson described were inhumane.

“They literally drop you to your room. And they leave you. They don’t come and say anything, they don’t check up, they don’t do anything. You get delivered your meals once a day. And you are just left,” she said.

Australia is currently building three more such ‘Centres for National Resilience’ camps in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

In Austria, police have been conducting “random checks” to ensure compliance with COVID-19 lockdowns for the country’s 2 million unvaccinated residents, CNBC reported. There, the unvaccinated are not allowed in public spaces.

In Illinois many public spaces – particularly in Cook County – are already supposed to be off limits to those residents five and older who are unvaccinated.  

In Washington State, the only state with an outdoor mask mandate, the possibility of interment camps is very real after a similar law passed 2003.

The Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board recently noted its support to segregate the unvaccinated from the vaccinated. Their suggestion? Deploy the National Guard to keep the vaccinate at home.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) called on governments to relax restrictions regarding Covid, not increase them noting the examples in Australia, Austria and Germany.

"It's not irrational for people that are aware of that information to go, 'you know, I think, cause I've seen a lot of my neighbors get COVID, and really well, it wasn't all that bad.' And I said, 'you know, I think maybe I'll take my chances, and I don't think I'm going to, I'm going to actually utilize my own freedom, my own health autonomy, and I'm going to choose not to get the vaccine.' And now we are demonizing those people,” Johnson said in a statement to Newsweek.