About a third of the U.S. military has refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19, a Pentagon official said Wednesday in a report.
Air Force General Jeff Taliaferro, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional court that “acceptance rates are somewhere in the two-thirds territory,” according to the Daily Beast.
While the vaccine is “clearly safe for service members,” soldiers need education “to help them understand the benefits” of the shootings, he told the House Armed Services Committee.
In all, the Department of Defense has completely vaccinated 147,000 members of the service and 359,000 have received a first dose, Pentagon official Robert Salesses reported at the exit.
Those who have rejected can still be deployed, Taliaferro said.
“We have already demonstrated over the last year that we are fully capable of operating in a COVID environment,” he said, according to Inside Defense.
Officials said they expect all Department of Defense personnel (which also includes civilians and contractors) to be vaccinated in late July or early August, the site reports.
At least 235,258 people in the department have been infected with COVID-19 over the past year, according to a Military.com account, with many of the worst outbreaks aboard Navy ships, including the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where hundreds of sailors they got it wrong last year.
The percentage of military acceptance of the vaccine is at the same level as the U.S. general population, according to a study in the journal Social Science & Medicine, which found that 31 percent of the general population has no plans to get vaccinated.
A previous study found that up to 51% of Americans would reject shots.
A Pentagon representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.