“The military has always had a policy of discharging those who refuse a vaccine.”
****************
I understand the military’s policy as the rapid spread of infections in close quarters can be problematic with respect to readiness issues. That said, COVID was not a great threat to young, healthy people and the long term effects of the vaccine were unknown (not to mention its efficacy). Not unreasonable for them to have concerns about taking the vaccine due to perceived concerns over long term risks.
The military rarely concedes to individual wishes, although the LGBTQetc personnel do seem to get plenty of accommodations and they may have been able to collectively resist the vaccine if they had wanted to fight it.
A lot of people unfamiliar with the military have the idea that separation due to refusal to take the Covid vaccine was something new and particular to the Covid vaccine.
It’s not, and I just wanted to address that. The military’s default position is that you have to take whatever vaccines that they decide to give you. They are treating the Covid vaccine the same as they do all of the others in their arsenal.
“That said, COVID was not a great threat to young, healthy people and the long term effects of the vaccine were unknown”
There’s nothing magical about time passing. Vaccines have traditionally taken a long time to validate simply because three stages of testing have been run sequentially instead of in parallel. What’s important is the number of individuals being tested, not how much time elapses afterwards. Warp Speed ran three stages of testing simultaneously, with a huge number of participants. It’s the largest sample size ever done for any vaccine, all done before the vaccines were authorized for general release.
“(not to mention its efficacy)”
Efficacy is measured by how well a vaccine stimulates antibody production against a specific antigen. The antigen target for all of the Warp Speed vaccines was the spike protein of the 2020 virus. The “archaic” Covid virus. Within a year of the release of the vaccines the virus with the archaic spike ceased to circulate. That’s effective. What continues to circulate are variants having a different spike. Immune systems trained by the 1st generation vaccine don’t see those as the enemy.