WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Congressional Republicans have secured a rare victory by forcing through a repeal of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the U.S. military, but four GOP senators kept them from following through with the added step of reinstating service members who lost their careers due to the policy.
Last August, at the direction of President Joe Biden, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the secretaries of all military branches to “immediately begin full [COVID] vaccination of all members of the Armed Forces” and “impose ambitious timelines for implementation.” The majority of service members complied, but tens of thousands remain unvaccinated, with many seeking exemptions.
The vast majority of exemption requests have been denied, and last December the military began discharging soldiers for refusing the shots, prompting legal challenges that have so far been neglected by the U.S. Supreme Court. While litigation is ongoing, such lawsuits did get the Navy and Marine Corps to start rolling back penalties for service members seeking religious accommodations in September.
As LifeSiteNews covered December 9, Republicans in the House of Representatives attached language to the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual defense funding package, declaring that within 30 days of enactment “the Secretary of Defense shall rescind the mandate the members of the Armed Forces be vaccinated against COVID-19,” and the bill passed 350-80. The language, while a victory, did not extend to reinstatement or back pay.
The Daily Caller reported that the NDAA passed the Senate 83-11 on December 15 as well, with the mandate repeal intact. However, a proposed amendment to also reinstate soldiers forced out of service for refusing to take the jab – such as U.S. Army Lt. Col. Bradley Miller – only received a 54-40 vote, failing to clear the 60-vote threshold for passage.
What’s more, Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Mike Rounds of South Dakota joined the Democrats in voting against the amendment.
In response to the Daily Caller, Cassidy attempted to justify his vote on the grounds that the amendment would have contravened “direct orders from commanding officers. I voted to end the COVID vaccine mandate in the military, but it is not Congress’s place to intervene in the chain of command and set a precedent for military personnel to ignore direct orders.” The other three senators did not respond to justify their votes.
Many Americans in and out of the military harbor moral and practical reservations about the COVID-19 vaccines, given the use of aborted fetal cells in their development, the superiority of natural immunity, COVID’s low risk to most otherwise-healthy individuals, the vaccines’ failure to prevent infection, their accelerated development under former President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative giving them only a fraction of the evaluation and development time vaccines normally take, the lack of transparency from their manufacturers, and mounting evidence of serious adverse effects.
The U.S. government’s federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports 35,820 myocarditis and pericarditis cases as of December 9. An April study out of Israel indicates that COVID infection alone cannot account for such cases, despite claims to the contrary. Reports submitted to VAERS about possible side effects are unconfirmed, as anyone can submit a report, but CDC researchers recognize a “high verification rate of reports of myocarditis to VAERS after mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination,” leading to the conclusion that “under-reporting is more likely” than over-reporting.
VAERS is not the only data source indicating cause for concern. Data from the Pentagon’s Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) has been similarly alarming, showing that 2021 saw drastic spikes in a variety of diagnoses for serious medical issues over the previous five-year average, including hypertension (2,181%), neurological disorders (1,048%), multiple sclerosis (680%), Guillain-Barre syndrome (551%), breast cancer, (487%), female infertility (472%), pulmonary embolism (468%), migraines (452%), ovarian dysfunction (437%), testicular cancer (369%), and tachycardia (302%).
In September, the Japanese Society for Vaccinology published a peer-reviewed study conducted by researchers from Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Maryland, which found that the “Pfizer trial exhibited a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group” while the “Moderna trial exhibited a 6% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group,” for a combined “16% higher risk of serious adverse events in mRNA vaccine recipients.”
While defenders of vaccine mandates are quick to stress that the military has long required soldiers to vaccinate against a range of diseases due to the harsh and exotic locales soldiers are sent to for extended periods of time and the close quarters they typically share with one another, previous vaccines were typically subjected to far more evaluation before being put into widespread use than the COVID shots.
The vaccine mandates have been particularly challenging for the military, as mass purges of qualified fighting men and women threatened soldier and pilot shortages in the tens of thousands, adding to broader problems of military readiness, troop morale, and public confidence.
During a Pentagon press briefing in April on the Army’s budget for Fiscal Year 2023, Under Secretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo announced the Army had “proactively made a decision to temporarily reduce our end strength from 485,000 soldiers to 476,000 in FY ’22, and 473,000 in FY ’23.” Military Times reported at the time that this “could leave the service at its smallest size since 1940, when it had just over 269,000 troops.”