Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Military Chaplains’ COVID Vaccine Case

• The Supreme Court has dismissed a lawsuit filed by military chaplains alleging retaliation for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
• They accused the Defense Department of denying religious exemptions and ruining their careers.
• In 2023, an appeals court ruled the case moot since the military vaccination mandate was overturned.

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to hear a case involving 39 military chaplains who say they continue to face recriminations for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine for religious reasons.

In an announcement Monday of the cases the court has chosen to hear next year, the justices denied the chaplains’ motion to reconsider last year’s dismissal of the case by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. UNITED STATES.

The appeals court ruled that the Defense Department’s decision in January 2023 to rescind the vaccination mandate made the chaplains’ case moot.

In their petition, the chaplains said they needed the court to review the case in order to protect them and their First Amendment rights. They argued that many continue to have poor grades on their physical fitness reports, which influences assignments and promotions.

“The careers of these chaplains are dead men as a direct result of filing (religious accommodation requests),” the petition states.

According to court documents, the chaplains filed the lawsuit “when it became apparent” that the Department of Defense was denying requests for religious accommodations. They claimed that since the mandate was dropped, the Department of Defense has made false claims that all negative actions had been removed from the personnel records of those who requested a religious exemption.

With the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision stands, an affirmation of the lower court’s finding in the case, Israel Alvarado et. Al. v. Austin, moot.

At least 50 service members have already sued the Defense Department over its vaccination mandate, alleging that the services and the Pentagon violated their right to religious freedom for “flatly refusing” their request for religious exemptions from the vaccine against COVID-19.

In a case involving several Navy SEALsA a district court judge struck down the Navy’s ability to punish sailors for refusing vaccine order, a decision that was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals but later rejected by the United States Supreme Court.

The Ministry of Defense was subsequently ordered to pay $1.8 million in legal fees as settlement for two trials on the warrant.

The Department of Defense began requiring service members to get COVID-19 vaccinations in August 2021. More than 2 million troops and nearly 350,000 civilian employees of the Department of Defense have received the vaccines, two of which have used an emerging technology – messenger RNA – to teach the recipient’s immune system. to replicate the Spike protein found on the COVID-19 virus and destroy it.

More than 17,000 military personnel have refused to get vaccinated, with some citing concerns about the new technology and others saying they oppose it for religious reasons, noting that widely available vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson were tested using cell lines derived from fetuses. tissue obtained from abortions decades ago.

Approximately 8,400 soldiers were discharged, including 3,717 Marines, 2,041 Marine sailors, 1,841 Army soldiers, and 834 Aviation And Space Force members, and more than 1,000 military personnel were granted religious exemptions before the mandate was scrapped.

A total of 690 Department of Defense service members, dependents, and civilian employees died from COVID-19 between the start of the pandemic in early 2020 and December 8, 2022, when the DoD stopped issuing updates. up-to-date on its COVID-related deaths.

Nearly 1.2 million Americans have died and more than 7 million deaths have occurred worldwide from the virus, first detected in China in late 2019.