Twenty Navy sailors and more than 250 Marines have been discharged for refusing to receive the coronavirus vaccination.
The Navy announced its first round of discharges on Wednesday, while the Marines updated their total from 206 to 251 on Thursday. The sailors were completing their initial training periods within their first 180 days of active duty at the time of separation.
Ninety-four percent of the Marines are fully vaccinated while an additional 2% are partially vaccinated, according to data from the service branch, while the Navy’s vaccination rate for active-duty troops is higher.
Additionally, the Navy announced that there are still more than 5,200 active-duty sailors and nearly 3,000 reserves who are unvaccinated as of Wednesday.
Slightly more than 300 permanent or temporary medical exemptions and an additional 74 administrative exemptions have been approved by the Navy while there have been just above 3,000 active-duty sailors who requested religious exemptions to the vaccination, though none have been granted.
Earlier this week, a federal judge ruled in favor of roughly three dozen Navy SEALs who filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense over the vaccine mandate. The service members argued that their sincerely held religious beliefs, which prevent them from getting the coronavirus vaccine, were not legitimately considered before being rejected.
“If the department of defense is going to make medical and administrative exemptions available, they also have to make religious exemptions available. And the religious exemptions cannot be a complete sham process as they have been here with the COVID vaccine,” Mike Berry, a lawyer with the First Liberty Institute who is representing the SEALs, previously told the Washington Examiner.
“If I were the Navy, I would look at this opinion and say, we need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how we’re going to implement this vaccine mandate in a way that doesn’t violate the constitution and doesn’t violate federal law,” he added.
While dozens of Republican lawmakers and the America First Policy Institute, a policy group backed by former President Donald Trump, filed an amicus brief in support of the SEALs, not everyone believes in their case.
Professor Eugene R. Fidell, a law professor at New York University who is an expert in military justice, called the lawsuit “preposterous” and said the vaccination refusals amount to a “mutiny,” in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“I think it’s important to recognize that this is actually not a vaccine objection,” he explained. “This is a political statement. The one thing that distinguishes the COVID vaccine from the other required vaccinations, for which everybody basically complies, is that this one is invested with a political balance. This is not actually an expression of religious objection or anything else besides the clinic equivalent of wearing a [Make America Great Again] hat.”
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Fidell also tied in the lawsuit as a part of a larger picture, which includes a group of Republican lawmakers who have pushed back on DOD’s vaccination mandate as it relates to the National Guard. To date, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt filed lawsuits on the matter, though the latter case was already rejected.
