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Lloyd J. Austin III, the protection secretary, has written a letter to seven Republican governors, rejecting their requests for exemptions from coronavirus vaccination mandates for his or her states’ Nationwide Guard troops.
The rejection — despatched to the governors of Alaska, Oklahoma, Texas, Idaho, Mississippi, Nebraska and Wyoming, who’ve all sought to permit their guard troops to refuse the vaccine with out penalties — units the stage for a possible authorized battle.
“In making the choice to require vaccination towards Covid-19 for service members,” Mr. Austin wrote: “I thought-about the hundreds of hospitalizations and the a whole bunch of deaths amongst service members, civilians, and their households associated to Covid-19. Covid-19 takes our service members out of the combat, briefly or completely, and jeopardizes our skill to fulfill mission necessities.”
“Failure by a member to take action will result in a prohibition on participation in drills, coaching, and different responsibility carried out underneath Title 32 and can jeopardize the member’s standing within the Nationwide Guard,” Mr. Austin added.
Federal officers have lengthy mentioned that governors don’t have any authorized standing to permit Guard members to refuse to adjust to the navy’s vaccine mandate. State officers and a few authorized consultants, nonetheless, consider that until Nationwide Guard members are federally deployed, they’re underneath the jurisdiction of the governor of their state and subsequently not topic to federal mandates. Will probably be as much as the governors to see how far they want to push this dispute.
Roughly 97 p.c of the 1.3 million active-duty service members in america navy have had no less than one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, however the proportion is far decrease for the Guard and Reserve, who nonetheless have time to conform earlier than their deadline later this yr. The deadlines for active-duty forces handed late final yr, with fewer than 100 members of the navy being separated for failure to conform. Not a single soldier within the Military, as an example, has left thus far over refusal to get a shot.
Exemptions from the mandate have been few in quantity, and infrequently momentary. Two members of the U.S. Marine Corps had been just lately given non secular exemptions from the Pentagon’s vaccine mandate, the primary of their form because the mandate was introduced final summer season.
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