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The ACLU, Prior to COVID, Denounced Mandates and Coercive Measures to Fight Pandemics

In a New York Times op-ed this week, the group completely reversed its views, arguing vaccine mandates help civil liberties and bodily autonomy "is not absolute."

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the...ovid-denounced

Government agencies have an essential role to play in helping to prevent and mitigate epidemics. Unfortunately, in recent years, our government’s approach to preparing the nation for a possible influenza pandemic has been highly misguided. Too often, policymakers are resorting to law enforcement and national security-oriented measures that not only suppress individual rights unnecessarily, but have proven to be ineffective in stopping the spread of disease and saving lives . . . .

A separate ACLU report from 2015, issued during the ebola epidemic, contained a similar message. It warned “against politically motivated and scientifically unwarranted quarantines, which the report found violated individuals’ rights and hampered efforts to end the outbreak.” Hysteria over ebola became so intense that the ACLU “found that people were illegally deprived of their right to due process under the 14th Amendment because the quarantines and movement restrictions were not scientifically justified.”

While both reports acknowledge that more restrictive measures can be justified under extreme circumstances, the crux of each is that voluntary compliance is better than coercion, that state mandates typically fail, and that the far greater danger is vesting too much power in the hands of the state, which it will never relinquish given the permanence of pandemics.

How the ACLU fell from those traditional and vital civil liberties positions to urging this week in The New York Times that “far from compromising civil liberties, vaccine mandates actually further civil liberties,” is anyone's guess. But what is beyond doubt is that it is a far fall indeed. And most of all, hearing the ACLU invoke the standard rationale of authoritarians — we all have the fundamental right to bodily integrity and to make our own health care decisions, but these rights are not absolute — is nothing short of jarring.

Update, Sept. 7, 2021, 6:58 p.m.: Shortly after publication of this article, a former ACLU lawyer, Margaret Winter, noted in response: “It was NOT just ‘prior to covid’ that ACLU denounced vaccine mandates: Read ACLU's 2020 position paper passionately and correctly arguing that vaccine mandates ‘exacerbate racial disparities and harm the civil liberties of all.’” Winter was referencing this ACLU report, from May of 2020, that warned of the serious dangers of “immunity passports," under which citizens who already got COVID and thus had immunity would enjoy rights not available to others:

We at the ACLU have serious concerns about the adoption of any such proposal, because of its potential to harm public health, incentivize economically-vulnerable people to risk their health by contracting COVID-19, exacerbate racial and economic disparities, and lead to a new health surveillance infrastructure that endangers privacy rights. . . . This division would likely worsen existing racial, disability, and economic disparities in America and lead people struggling to afford basic necessities to deliberately risk their health.

While such a scheme is different in degree from vaccine passports let alone vaccine mandates — which the ACLU is now championing — its rationale for opposing such a system is fully applicable: “there are serious civil liberties and civil rights harms from making workplace decisions on that basis,” adding: “any immunity passport system endangers privacy rights by creating a new surveillance infrastructure to collect health data.”

This law enforcement/national security strategy shifts the focus of preparedness from preventing and mitigating an emergency to punishing people who fail to follow orders and stay healthy.

Much of the report is devoted to an examination of how the U.S. government has historically treated pandemics. As it reviews each pandemic — including horrifically lethal ones such as the plague and smallpox — the ACLU concludes over and over that American health authorities excessively relied on coercion rather than education and persuasion, fueled by media-aided fear porn and alarmist narratives:…

And people wonder how Germans allowed Hitler’s rise to power.