The Defense Department on Monday asked the Supreme Court to let its COVID-19 vaccine requirements apply to unwilling U.S. Navy SEALs following a federal judge’s ruling that temporarily blocked the Pentagon from halting their deployments.
President Joe Biden’s Defense Department argues lower courts have disrupted safety and health protocols of the armed forces, such as allowing an unvaccinated SEAL to deploy to Hawaii “for duty on a submarine against its military judgment.”
“The Navy has an extraordinarily compelling interest in ensuring that the servicemembers who perform those missions are as physically and medically prepared as possible,” according to court filings by the administration. “That includes vaccinating them against COVID-19, which is the least restrictive means of achieving that interest.”
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The legal challenge to the mandates was brought by nearly three dozen Naval Special Warfare Command service members, including 26 Navy SEALs, who object to receiving the vaccine on religious grounds.
“Both Judge O’Connor and the Fifth Circuit got it right; there is no Covid exception to our Constitution. But the Biden Administration appears to be more interested in promoting its harmful agenda than in defending the Constitution,” Mike Berry, counsel for the Navy SEALs, said in a statement. “As the Fifth Circuit did last week, the U.S. Supreme Court should reject this latest attempt to punish our clients and make clear, once and for all, that our service members do not forfeit their religious freedom because they are in the military.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated the vaccine in August, and each service branch was then given the chance to implement the order how it saw fit. Each branch’s vaccine deadline for active-duty troops occurred months ago, and the overwhelming majority of troops, roughly 95% or higher of each branch, have gotten the vaccine.
Service members were allowed to apply for religious or medical exemptions from the vaccine, and the lack of approved religious exemption requests has raised questions about the process. There have been roughly 16,000 such requests, but the services have granted a total of 20 of them.
The SEALs are not the only service members who have sued the department over the vaccine mandate.
In January, a federal judge in Texas let stand an injunction telling the Navy it could not use a SEAL’s vaccination status to play a role in deployment decisions. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit subsequently declined to put the judge’s order on hold last month.
The Supreme Court requested that challengers file a response by March 14 at 4 p.m.
