WASHINGTON, D.C. – This week, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed a memorandum that no longer requires military service members or War Department civilians to receive the flu shot “effective immediately.”

Liberty Counsel represents military clients with religious objections to vaccines, including the flu shot. For instance, a U.S. Marine Corps First Lieutenant faces an administrative discharge after being denied a religious accommodation to be exempt from military vaccine policies. Liberty Counsel has already won a legal victory on this officer’s behalf and many others when it litigated against the Pentagon’s COVID-19 shot mandate in Navy SEAL 1 v. Austin and Colonel Financial Management Officer, et al. v. Austin obtaining multiple restraining orders and injunctions, including a class-wide injunction that led to the rescinding of the unconstitutional mandate. 

According to military medical researchers, the first flu vaccine mandate was implemented in 1945 after the devastation influenza caused in World War I and due to the threat of biological warfare from enemy nations. In his video announcement on X, Secretary Hegseth signaled the move is part of a larger effort to change the military’s vaccine policies after the harmful and experimental COVID-19 shot. The Pentagon uniformly denied most of the 36,500 religious accommodation requests to abstain from the shot and forced more than 8,300 service members to be involuntarily discharged for objecting and refusing to take it.