All active-duty soldiers are expected to be vaccinated before Dec. 15, the U.S. military said Tuesday.
“This is literally a matter of life and death for our soldiers, their families and the communities in which we live,” Lt. Gen. R. Scott Dingle, the Army’s general surgeon, said in a statement. “The count of cases and deaths continue to be worrisome as the Delta variant spreads, making protection of force through compulsory vaccination a health and preparedness priority for the entire army.”
The Reserve and National Guard units are expected to be fully vaccinated by June 30, 2022. There are 485,000 active duty members in the military, 189,500 in the Reserve and 336,000 in the National Guard.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III issued a memorandum in August to address mandatory covid vaccines for service members who used only vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The Pfizer vaccine received full FDA approval in August.
Lloyd ordered the secretaries of the various branches of the Armed Forces to “impose ambitious deadlines for their implementation and to report regularly on the completion of vaccination using the systems established for other mandatory vaccination reports.”
The military said in a statement that members of the service who reject the vaccine will first be advised by their superiors. But if members of the service do not receive an exemption for legitimate medical, religious or administrative reasons and continue to breach the mandate, they could be discharged or disciplined, according to the statement.
President Joe Biden has begun using federal directives to demand vaccines from the U.S. workforce. Its recent executive order imposing vaccines on private sector employees, health care workers and federal contractors targets about 100 million workers. In early August, the president also gave his support to mandatory U.S. Army vaccinations.
