A retired three-star Coast Guard vice admiral has publicly criticized both the Biden administration and the Department of Defense for continuing to discharge service members who refuse to get the coronavirus vaccine.
Vice Adm. William “Dean” Lee, a Coast Guard veteran of more than three decades, published an open letter to fellow Coast Guard flag officers, which was obtained by the Washington Examiner, on Monday.
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Lee begins the letter by acknowledging that he isn’t against the vaccine and is vaccinated himself. But he goes on to say that he believes dismissing every service member who refuses the vaccine infringes upon First Amendment rights and that it is a hindrance to military readiness because each branch is in a recruiting hole. Dismissing these service members would exacerbate that problem.
“Reports of recruiting struggles across the services indicate that the vaccine mandates are an impediment to recruiting, exacerbating the current recruiting and retention problems that are already impacting force strength in some DoD components,” he wrote. “Enforcement of the blanket mandate is also resulting in separations of thousands of personnel and therefore is exacerbating force strength issues, and thus readiness concerns.”
He first spoke out after discovering that the Coast Guard dismissed seven cadets for not getting the vaccine in August.
“My service is running around like crazy, patting themselves on the back and giving high fives to each other over their emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Well, this is neither diverse — it’s neither equitable or inclusive — because up to seven people that they’re discharging, five of them are members of minority status,” he told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “I mean, so that’s not inclusive. So what they’re doing is they’re excluding men and women of faith.”
Each service has its own process for approving vaccination exemption requests (though a majority of them were denied), but they represent a small percentage of the overall forces, which overwhelmingly received the vaccine.
“Each request was evaluated on a case-by-case basis by the Coast Guard’s Office of Military Personnel Policy, and adjudicated by competent authority at Coast Guard Headquarters, with the advice of counsel, as required by law and Coast Guard policy,” Coast Guard Academy spokesman David Santos told the Day at the time. “None of the requests was approved. Four cadets chose to become vaccinated after their requests for exemptions were denied and four cadets chose to resign from the Academy.”
Hundreds of service members across all military branches have been discharged over their refusal to get the vaccine as mandated by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last August. Many of them applied for and were denied religious exemptions.
The department’s inspector general, Sean O’Donnell, warned in a June memo to Austin that he had concerns that the services had issued blanket denials to religious exemption requests.
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“The denial memorandums we reviewed generally did not reflect an individualized analysis, demonstrating that the Senior Military Official considered the full range of facts and circumstances relevant to the particular religious accommodation request,” O’Donnell wrote, the Military Times reported on Sept. 21.
Three Christian members of the Coast Guard filed a lawsuit over their denied religious exemption requests late last month, and in it, it was said that 881 members of the guard had their request denied. The suit also said the branch only approved roughly 1% of the religious exemption requests and that they were all for members already slated to separate or retire from the service, according to Stars and Stripes.
