In most parts of the country, the COVID-19 pandemic seems like ancient history. Masks, once commonplace, are now a rarity, and most people have stopped even testing themselves for COVID-19 when they get sick. And, at long last, the myriad pandemic-era government restrictions on our livelihoods and liberties have almost all expired. But on some college campuses, COVID-19 vaccine mandates remain in place — even though this doesn’t make any sense.

Rutgers University, for example, is reportedly disenrolling students this month, ahead of the fall semester, if they have failed to comply with its COVID-19 vaccine mandates. And, according to the group “No College Mandates” — which, you might guess, opposes campus COVID-19 vaccine mandates — just under 100 colleges and universities are still maintaining some form of vaccine mandate.

Examples include Trinity Washington University in D.C., Roosevelt University in Chicago, DePauw College in Indiana, California College of the Arts in San Francisco, Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Harvard University in Cambridge, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and many others . (Details of these mandates vary, and some include religious or medical exemptions, but many students have reported difficulty in obtaining exemptions.)

For so many institutions to maintain these mandates in the fall 2023 semester is truly absurd and indefensible on public health grounds.

To start, COVID-19 vaccine mandates on college campuses never made much sense to begin with because most of the population of a typical campus — healthy 18-, 19-, 20-, and 21-year-olds — was never at significant risk of death or hospitalization from COVID. If anything, campuses were much less vulnerable to the pandemic than almost anywhere else imaginable.

It’s absolutely true, as proponents of these mandates point out, that there are elderly professors or at-risk staff who might be exposed to COVID on campus. But that’s a reason for those individuals to consider getting themselves vaccinated, which significantly reduces the risk of hospitalization or death from COVID. If they get the vaccine, then it shouldn’t matter whether the students around them do. So, there’s no public health justification that could possibly justify trampling on students’ bodily autonomy and individual choice.

Because, after all, the COVID-19 vaccines do not stop COVID-19 from being spread at high rates. We all know many people in our lives who caught and spread COVID despite being vaccinated and even boosted. The original justification for mandates — that they would create “safe” zones and stop you from spreading to others — has completely and utterly fallen apart.

And, like any medical treatment, COVID-19 vaccines are not without their risks. In particular, young college-aged men face a heightened risk of experiencing myocarditis , a serious but treatable heart issue, as a side effect of COVID vaccines.

That’s not to say that the benefits might not still outweigh any risks, even for young men. They very well might. But that’s an individualized decision young people should be free to make in consultation with their doctors, not have it foisted upon them by university bureaucrats.

Ultimately, these mandates aren’t rooted in science or public health. They’re simply a result of deeply ideological campus administrators wanting to assert their control and signal allegiance to their political tribe. But, when it comes to matters of bodily autonomy and medical freedom, that’s no way to make such important decisions.

Brad Polumbo ( @Brad_Polumbo ) is an independent journalist, co-founder of BASEDPolitics , and a Washington Examiner contributor.