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Today is the last day for Army National Guard (ARNG) members to comply with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) COVID-19 vaccine mandate or face separation — unless the DOD pushes back the July 1 deadline, an idea Army officials are considering, according to internal documents.
Under the military’s mandate, after June 30, ARNG members won’t be paid when they are activated on federal status, which includes their monthly drill weekends and their two-week annual training period, Associated Press (AP) reported.
“No Department of Defense funding may be allocated for payment of duties performed [by] members of the National Guard who do not comply with COVID-19 vaccination requirements,” the Pentagon announced in November 2021.
“We’re going to give every soldier every opportunity to get vaccinated and continue their military career,” Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, ARNG director, on June 25 told AP. “Every soldier that is pending an exemption, we will continue to support them through their process.”
“We’re not giving up on anybody until the separation paperwork is signed and completed,” Jensen added. “There’s still time.”
But as reported June 22 by The Defender, an active-duty senior Army official with access to senior-level information revealed that with 120,000 troops then still unvaccinated, the U.S. Army was considering moving the July 1 deadline.
The whistleblower told The Defender, on condition of anonymity, that a June 2022 internal document revealed the Army is strongly considering pushing the deadline far into the future — but has not yet revealed a date change.
The DOD still plans to separate the unvaccinated soldiers, but instead of enforcing the June 30 deadline, “what they are going to do is hold off on separating soldiers on July 1,” and “will most likely push that into 2023 at the earliest,” the whistleblower said.
The June 2022 Army document confirms this, as it proposes that a “phased approach to involuntary separation” for unvaccinated service members would begin on October 1, 2022, with a “mandatory bar to reenlistment,” while “mandatory involuntary separations for COVID vaccine refusal” would begin January 1, 2023, and “last up to approximately 2 years.”
National Guard unique among service branches
Military branches had varying deadlines for their forces. The Air Force gave its active-duty service members until Nov. 2, 2021, to be vaccinated, while Air National Guard and Reservists had until Dec. 31, 2021, to comply.
The ARNG was given the longest amount of time to get the shots, mainly because it’s a large force of about 330,000 soldiers who are scattered around the country, many in remote locations, AP reported.
Just five days ago, Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, director of the ARNG, told the AP about 1,500 soldiers a week around the country are “moving into the vaccinated category” with the help of vaccination events.
“We expect, as we approach the deadline, that we’ll see some larger growth,” he said.
On the June 29 episode of The Hill’s “Rising,” host Kim Iversen pointed out that the ARNG is “a different service.”
“A lot of [ARNG members] are not full-time, so a lot of them are working regular jobs, they have regular families and lives, and then they go and they serve the country … It’s not like they’re being deployed off to Germany or Japan,” she said. “I think there’s why there’s more hesitancy.”
“It is something they are facing that is very authoritarian in my view,” Iversen said, adding, “We need to have a conversation about the limits of the military and what they can and cannot command of individuals.”
According to internal documents shared with The Defender, in the ARNG, 280,678 members are fully vaccinated (84.6%), and 7,735 are partially vaccinated (1 dose) (2.3%) — leaving 43,269, or 13%, who have not yet received a single dose.
The documents show that in some states, such as Oklahoma, the vaccination rate for members of the ARNG is as low as 74.11%.
The document lists 15,698 members as “refusals” and 6,749 (2.0%) as going through an exemption process — with 6,257 (1.9%) requesting a religious exemption and 492 (0.1%) requesting a medical exemption.
The document also notes that 80% of unvaccinated soldiers in the ARNG are age 32 or younger, with an average age of 26.2 and median age of 24.
According to CBS News, vaccine compliance among ARNG members is the lowest in the U.S. military — the rate among active-duty Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps is 97% or greater and the Air Guard uptake is about 94%, according to CBSNews.
