Pfizer has just gotten the gold seal approval from the FDA – and that’s all that needed to happen before the military decided that it was going to mandate the vaccine.
Troops better plan on rolling up a sleeve – or finding a new job.
In order to enroll in the military, there’s a long list of vaccines you need to get. COVID-19 has just made it onto that list. Servicemembers who have yet to get the vaccine will need to sit down for the shot. For those who don’t, they risk administrative or criminal action.
The Defense Department has already begun working on a policy where they’ll require the troops to get the vaccine. At this point in time, they can only require the Pfizer vaccine since it’s the only one that has received FDA approval.
John Kirby, the spokesman for the Pentagon, has already identified that there will be a timeline for completing the vaccines in the coming days.
Plenty of service members have been outspoken about not getting the COVID vaccine. However, now that it has received approval from the FDA, the DOD is anticipating that there won’t be a lot of pushback.
There will be pushback – and the guidance being prepared will lay out the recourse that commanders can use against troops who refuse. Some of the suggestions include evaluation marks that will prevent promotion, being placed in a non-deployable status and even the possibility of criminal charges.
If the military is going to reach 100 percent vaccination status, it has a long way to go. Only 58 percent of active-duty and reserve components have at least one dose of the COVID vaccine. The active-duty force is a lot closer to being vaccinated, though the Navy is leading the charge at 73 percent.
Once Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that he would be making the vaccines mandatory, even before Pfizer came forward with FDA approval, the vaccine status changed by about 2 percent in a week. It’s not a significant spike – which means that it’s not as if a large number of servicemembers decided to jump to attention with Austin’s memo.
The Department of Defense has a process in place for requesting religious or medical exemptions. The approval will require legal and spiritual counseling, which also means discussing all of the alternatives. When it comes to COVID, there aren’t too many alternatives. So, it’s most likely that the DOD will follow the same guidelines as the rest of the federal government – unvaccinated servicemembers would be subjected to COVID-19 testing weekly.
With a push to get so many people vaccinated, it’s going to end badly. The Pfizer vaccine just got FDA approval – and has the military forgotten that they, themselves, injected the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson into so many of their troops’ arms already?
There’s not enough science and not enough research to make a push, but the Biden administration will do it anyway. The real question becomes whether the service members are going to stick around to be guinea pigs or if they’re going to leave the military altogether.
With all that’s happening around the globe, we can’t afford to lose 40 percent of our military. Yet, Biden and the rest of his administration will ignore it so that they can take our liberties away one by one.