Do vaccine mandates violate civil liberties? Some who have refused vaccination claim as much.

We disagree.

At the ACLU, we are not shy about defending civil liberties, even when they are very unpopular. But we see no civil liberties problem with requiring Covid-19 vaccines in most circumstances.

While the permissibility of requiring vaccines for particular diseases depends on several factors, when it comes to Covid-19, all considerations point in the same direction. The disease is highly transmissible, serious and often lethal; the vaccines are safe and effective; and crucially there is no equally effective alternative available to protect public health.

In fact, far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties. They protect the most vulnerable among us, including people with disabilities and fragile immune systems, children too young to be vaccinated and communities of color hit hard by the disease.

Vaccine requirements also safeguard those whose work involves regular exposure to the public, like teachers, doctors and nurses, bus drivers and grocery store employees. And by inoculating people from the disease’s worst effects, the vaccines offer the promise of restoring to all of us our most basic liberties, eventually allowing us to return safely to life as we knew it, in schools and at houses of worship and political meetings, not to mention at restaurants, bars, and gatherings with family and friends.

Here’s why civil liberties objections to Covid vaccine mandates are generally unfounded.

Vaccines are a justifiable intrusion on autonomy and bodily integrity. That may sound ominous, because we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions. But these rights are not absolute. They do not include the right to inflict harm on others.

While vaccine mandates are not always permissible, they rarely run afoul of civil liberties when they involve highly infectious and devastating diseases like Covid-19. Although this disease is novel, vaccine mandates are not. Schools, health care facilities, the U.S. military and many other institutions have long required vaccination for contagious diseases like mumps and measles that pose far less risk than the coronavirus does today.

In the United States alone, more than 39 million people have been infected with Covid-19 and more than 600,000 people have died. People with intellectual and physical disabilities are more likely to contract Covid-19, and they have much higher rates of hospitalization and death. Children’s hospitals in Georgia, Louisiana and other states are reporting high admissions of infected patients, and many are running out of beds.

Even though the F.D.A. and independent medical experts have found Covid-19 vaccines to be extremely safe and highly effective, a sizable portion of the eligible population has chosen not to be vaccinated. 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.

Note: This editorial originally appeared in The New York Times on September 2, 2021.

Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau provided the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico with population counts to use in their redrawing of the electoral district boundaries for representation in Congress, state legislatures, and many county and municipal offices. This data release marks the official start of the once-in-a-decade redistricting process that will determine the allocation of political power and representation at every level of government across the country for the next ten years.

As the redistricting process begins in communities and jurisdictions across the United States, state legislatures have an obligation to ensure fair and equal representation for all people, upholding the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection and complying with the requirements of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The stakes could not be higher. The maps drawn this year will play a vital role in our communities and affect our day to day lives for the next decade. The drawing of district lines can dictate not only who runs for public office and who is elected, but also how financial resources are allocated for schools, hospitals, roads and more. And the representatives who are elected have the power to make decisions that greatly impact the communities they represent, from ensuring safe schools to adopting inclusive immigration policies. The people that live in a district can then in turn influence whether elected officials feel obligated to respond to a particular community’s needs. It is critical that congressional and state legislative district boundaries are not sacrificed to self-interest and political parties in the redistricting process.

Unfortunately, instead of drawing congressional and state legislative district boundaries that fairly reflect the population, many states have used the redistricting process to manipulate electoral boundaries to give an unfair political advantage to a particular political party or group—a practice known as gerrymandering. It is a dangerous political practice that harms communities across the country. Instead of drawing fair maps, bad actors slice and dice our communities so politicians can pick and choose who they represent. But voters should be choosing their politicians—not the other way around. The threat of diminished representation from improper redistricting is particularly acute for communities of color, who already face numerous obstacles to meaningful participation in the political process. State legislatures have time and time again drawn maps that relegate voters of color into districts that minimize their political power, fracturing those communities across multiple districts or improperly concentrating them together in a single district. As the Census data released on Thursday confirms, nearly all of the country’s growth over the past decade is attributable to the growth in our nation’s communities of color. Fair maps must adequately reflect that reality.

As redistricting begins nationwide, the ACLU will continue to monitor state legislatures and independent commissions across the country to ensure they heed the fundamental principles of democracy, representation, and equality.

Marcos Castillo is intelligent, industrious, and the boyfriend of a wonderful woman. He is also paralyzed from the neck down. For him to get out of bed in the morning, to get showered, dressed, and out of the house, he needs someone to come in to help him.

For Marcos, and people with disabilities like him, our Medicaid program guarantees that he could get that help if he lived in a nursing home. There is no such guarantee that he could get that help in his own home — despite the lower cost of in-home care. This irony — which the disability community has called “institutional bias” — is not just a problem with the Medicaid system, it is a civil rights issue.

In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled in Olmstead v. L.C. that people who are able to live in the community with appropriate support have a right to live in the community, and that segregating them in institutions is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. But without the Medicaid funding to provide support at home, this right exists in theory only — not in practice.

Until now. As part of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan, his administration is proposing to fund $400 billion for Medicaid’s home and community-based services (HCBS). This proposal will expand eligibility, eliminate waitlists for millions of people, and finally provide decent wages and benefits to the workers who provide these supports.

Home care workers, who are overwhelmingly Black and Brown women, have long been excluded from workplace protections that the vast majority of professions enjoy, and not by accident. Racist policies dating back to the New Deal era continue to treat home care workers as “companions” to seniors and people with disabilities instead of recognizing them as professionals who do essential work.

President Biden’s proposal would be a historic investment in the expansion of the safety net for a group of mostly Black and Brown workers who have been denied these basic protections for too long. The $400 billion investment includes funding to hire more home care workers and provide them with fair wages and benefits, the ability to join a union and, for immigrant workers, a path to citizenship.

Congress must now take President Biden’s lead and honor his commitment to funding the full $400 billion for home and community-based services. The budget resolution passed in Congress in August represents a major step forward, but with negotiations over a final bill still ongoing, we must continue to push our representatives and senators to ensure this funding is a priority.

That’s why the ACLU has joined Ady Barkan’s “Be A Hero” fund, Service Employees International Union, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance to launch a campaign lifting up the stories of people with disabilities, and their direct care workers. This campaign will help members of the Senate understand the critical need to fund home and community-based services in the final budget reconciliation package.

We are starting this campaign in Arizona, where Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has yet to commit support for home and community-based services in the budget reconciliation package. There, we are featuring the stories of Arizona residents Marcos Castillo and Taryn Bailey, with an urgent plea to Sen. Sinema and her constituents: “Home care can’t wait.”

People with disabilities tend to lead quiet lives within small communities. Too often, the broader public — and our elected representatives — don’t understand the details of our lives. That we need support, and that the people who provide that support need decent wages and benefits, or they can’t stick around. We are grateful to the seniors and people with disabilities who have been willing to share their stories, and proud to invest in sharing their stories with a wider audience.

There is no time to waste. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that we will need an additional 1.1 million home care workers by 2029 to care for our aging population and Americans with disabilities. With so many home care workers affected by COVID-19, and low pay and precarious working conditions, we may not have enough workers to care for our loved ones.

We can’t let the default institutionalization of seniors and people with disabilities continue to be the norm in the United States: Congress must act before this once-in-a-generation opportunity closes.