The Department of Defense’s (DoD) requirement that all members of the Armed Forces receive COVID-19 vaccinations, even if they’ve already had the virus and developed immunity, has had a severely disruptive effect within military ranks, resulting in the denial of promotions and assignments to those who refused vaccination and in thousands of service members having to leave the military.
The vaccination order has given rise to a spate of lawsuits and is likely to spur more challenges as more people come to see that officials who grant exemptions on other grounds are unwilling to accommodate those who file religious accommodation requests (RARs), service members and military experts have told The Epoch Times.
“I have talked to military members and no one likes this policy; no one thinks it’s a good idea. I agree with them that this policy is going to backfire in a big way. It’s going to force out people who are moral, ethical service members out of the military and will leave a readiness gap. But the other problem is this is a relatively untested vaccine and we’re all just now starting to see what the health effects are,” Susan Katz Keating, a journalist specializing in military affairs and the editor and publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine, told The Epoch Times.
The vaccine mandate has been enshrined in DoD policy as a consequence of President Joe Biden’s July 29, 2021, order to the department to add COVID-19 to its list of required vaccinations. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s subsequent memorandum on Aug. 24, 2021, required each branch of the military to vaccinate all service members.
The order quickly met with resistance from military personnel seeking exemption on various grounds, from concerns about the safety and unknown long-term side effects of vaccines that they felt had been rushed through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process, to religious objections on the part of those who take issue with the use of fetal cell lines in the development of the drugs.
A Professional Soldier’s View
Active-duty military personnel who spoke to The Epoch Times acknowledged broad disapproval of the DoD’s stance on vaccinations, and some of them signaled that, no matter how mixed the results so far, legal challenges to the policy are just getting started.
Opposition runs high among military personnel, Rob Green, an active-duty Navy commander (O5) currently serving with Maritime Expeditionary Security Group Two, told The Epoch Times.
“I don’t want to speak for 2.1 million of my friends, but I’ll say that there are many who did not want to get vaccinated. They’re being told that they have to, but common sense told these people that if a pandemic has a 99.99 percent survivability rate, and you’re in the healthiest possible age group in America, ‘Why am I going to take this risk?’” Green said.
Green described Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine as an emergency-use product that never went through the twelve-year cycle of approval and review which a vaccine would ordinarily be subject to, but instead was rushed through the process in one year, with important testing left undone.
He noted that Comirnaty-labeled vaccines—the drug that received full Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval—became available for the DoD to order only as of May 20 this year. According to Green, this means that, going back as far as Aug. 24, 2021, the DoD had been illegally pushing the use of a drug that still had the status of an Emergency Use Authorized (EUA) product, and one that service members, therefore, had every legal right to refuse.
“The order to vaccinate is not a lawful order. As a matter of fact, in federal court, the Department of Justice, on behalf of the Department of Defense, admitted on May 20 that basically they had no licensed product before then,” Green said.
No statutory basis exists for denying any American the right to refuse to a EUA drug, Green believes. Under EUA law 21 USC § 306bbb, the government has far-reaching responsibilities when it comes to advising people of their rights concerning the administration of vaccines and other drugs, according to a whistleblower report circulated by Green and obtained by The Epoch Times.
While the military can make use of a presidential waiver process under 10 USC §1107a, this waiver does not mean that service members are legally required to use a EUA product, only that the requirement to inform them of their right to refuse does not apply, the report states.
The vaccines forced on service personnel before May 20, 2022, were not Comirnaty-labeled, and hence did not meet a fundamental legal obligation, Green argued.
“Labeling is a legal requirement in order to have a licensed product. You can’t waive proper labeling. That amounts to fraudulent labeling, which actually has its own statute law. They knew what they did was illegal,” Green said.
The Pentagon has issued a policy (pdf) saying the FDA-approved Comirnaty and EUA Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are interchangeable, but the legality of this directive is contested by service members opposing the mandate.
Green said he knows many service members who have been unfairly, and illegally, penalized for their refusal to take the vaccine, including one young man who he identified for purposes of this article as Owen. In Green’s telling, Owen enlisted under a delayed entry program. The DoD rolled out its vaccine mandate after Owen had signed up, but before he arrived at boot camp. When Owen put in an RAR, he was told that the process required him to confer with a chaplain, but, being in boot camp, he had no access to a chaplain. In the end, the military kicked Owen out after only 39 days of service.
Full article: Legal challenges to Pentagon’s vaccine mandate just getting started, military insiders say