The American Constitutional Rights Union, joined by the Alabama Center for Law and Liberty, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in support of Navy Seal 1 and other religious objectors to the military’s demand that they receive the COVID-19 vaccines.

The ACRU argued that the military’s invocation of readiness as a justification for its mandate fails because it is overbroad and underinclusive. It inexplicably requires military members who have had COVID to be vaccinated, and there are many other reasons (other illness, accident or injury, pregnancy) that can delay or block a deployment. In addition, the vaccines can cause myocarditis and pericarditis, both of which would render th affected soldier nondeployable. Finally, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines do not prevent COVID like the polio vaccine prevents polio. Instead, at most, they mitigate the effects of an infection without affecting the infected person’s ability to transmit the disease. In short, the mandate is self-defeating without being clearly effective.