Speaker 1: OK.
The U.S. Army, after giving so much notice and giving every opportunity for service members
to go and get themselves vaccinated with the COVID vaccine is at the end of the grace period,
and the U.S. Army is going to start discharging COVID vaccine refusers effective immediately.
NPR reporting.
U.S. Army soldiers who refused to be vaccinated for COVID will soon be discharged.
The military branch announced yesterday Wednesday.
The army said it will quote immediately begin separating soldiers from the service who refused
to be vaccinated or who don't have an approved or pending request for exemption.
Secretary of the Army Christine Warmth said army readiness readiness depends on soldiers
who are prepared to train, deploy, fight and win our nation's wars.
Unvaccinated soldiers present risk to the force and jeopardize readiness.
Soldiers who are discharged for refusing to be vaccinated quote will not be eligible for
involuntary separation pay and may even have to return unearned, special or incentive pay.
Now the right is framing this as we are dramatically weakening.
I don't know why I'm doing the Alex Jones voice.
We are dramatically weakening the military and we are going to be more battle rather
than alpha in fighting wars, which they claim they don't want to fight anyway.
But as of January 26th, as the article points out, 96 percent of active duty troops were
completely vaccinated.
Thirty three hundred soldiers have refused.
Fifty nine hundred have temporary exemptions, and those are temporary in the sense that
their requests are still being reviewed.
This is really not a big deal.
It's time you need a bunch of vaccines to be in the military.
This is the latest vaccine you need.
It's not controversial.
We've gone through the list.
I'm not going to do it again.
Is it 10 15?
Depending on where you're serving, it can be closer to 20 different vaccines that you
have to get when you're in the military.
If you won't follow a simple service wide vaccine mandate that is like the 13th or the
18th or whatever, it's not unique.
It's not.
We've never had any vaccine requirements.
And now here's one you've got to get.
They all got in line for all the other vaccines when they enlisted.
It's just time to say you're not fit for military service.
Oh, I'm not taking this one vaccine because of my rights or my religion or.
Come on, guys, come on.
Now one thing that I heard from some service members about and I did a little research
into this and it does appear to be true, is a.
Bill was passed taking dishonorable discharge is off the table for vaccine refusers.
So what I'm hearing from some of our viewers who are in the military is that there are
people who have been sort of wanting to get out for a little while and they're taking
this as an opportunity.
Now again, we're only talking about 3300 unvaccinated with no exemption right now.
So it's like a tiny, tiny percentage of individuals and some fraction of those maybe refusing
the vaccine, not because they're actually against it, but because they want a way to
get out without a dishonorable discharge.
So that may be a factor to some degree, but I don't think it's a dominant thing.
But anecdotally, it does seem to exist from what I'm hearing, but there's really nothing
controversial here.
It is not going to affect overall military readiness.
It's not going to affect in any material way the massive fighting force that the United
States has.
And it really shouldn't even be getting the attention that it's getting because it's not
never needed vaccines.
And now you do.
Like I said, it's you always needed 12 to 13 or but depending on where you're serving,
you needed 17 now you need 18.
It's not a big deal and it shouldn't be made into one.
And the military has been saying for a long time, this is exactly what we're going to
do.
And now they're doing it.
It would be more of a problem, I would argue, if they said that this is what they were going
to do and then they failed to do it.
They promised this was the path and they're doing it, and it makes perfect sense.
If you disagree with me, let me know you can find me on Twitter at Packman.
We're going to take a very short break.
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