THE US Department of Defense (DOD) is launching two task forces to review the military’s covid vaccine mandate during the pandemic, Anthony Tata, Under Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness, has announced.

‘These task forces will examine the development, implementation and outcomes of the policy,’ Tata wrote on X.

According to a December 2022 DOD document, 8,123 service members were discharged as of November 30, 2022, for covid vaccine refusal.

In a video accompanying his post, Tata said: ‘These task forces will include members of the affected community, and they will be focused on making sure that this never, ever happens again to our servicemen and women in uniform, their families or department civilians.’

Robby Soave, co-host of The Hill’s Rising, the first media outlet to report the story, said:

‘I am glad for this policy of bringing back the people who resigned over the vaccine mandate. As it turned out, the covid vaccine is mostly a personal health decision . . . There isn’t enough of a public health justification, in my view, to say you should have to get it to be part of government service or part of military service.’

Attorney Dale Saran, who represents service members challenging the military’s mandate in court, said: ‘I believe that in the coming weeks and months, we’ll begin the process of unwinding the mess that the Biden administration made of the armed forces over its illegal Covid-19 mandates.’

In August 2021, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated the covid vaccine for all US military members.

A year later, Congress passed the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which required Austin to rescind the mandate. He officially lifted the mandate in January 2023.

In January of this year, President Donald Trump issued a presidential action directing the DOD to reinstate all previously discharged members, restoring their former rank, full back pay and benefits.

Following Trump’s executive order, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines implemented procedures to reinstate discharged service members. In April, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum that further clarified those procedures.

However, the DOD did not offer back pay to service members previously discharged for being unvaccinated, and it kept disciplinary actions related to their vaccine refusal on their records.

As a result, by April, the military had reinstated only 43 of the more than 8,000 discharged service members.

Saran said some of his clients have told him that the reinstatement process has ‘not been a model of efficiency’.

On October 3, Tata wrote on X that ‘many’ former military service members had been ‘impacted by the unlawful COVID vaccine mandate’ and promised that he would act to bring them back into service.

‘We know the reinstatement process isn’t perfect. We’re going to keep working hard to make it faster and easier,’ Tata wrote.

Days later, the Pentagon directed military service leaders to provide ‘white glove’ treatment for previously discharged service members seeking to reenlist. The order followed a memo from Tata instructing leaders to make changes at Military Entrance Processing Stations, where recruits undergo examinations before entering active service.

On October 29, Tata said ‘many impacted warriors’ had reached out to him ‘with covid reinstatement questions and concerns’ and that his office was ‘engaging with the Services daily to follow up and close the “last mile”’.

In another X post last month, he acknowledged that service members seeking reinstatement were still facing several ‘last mile’ issues in the covid reinstatement process.’

‘At this stage, any delays are unacceptable,’ Tata wrote.

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