Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that U.S. troops will no longer be required to get the flu vaccine in support of their “medical autonomy” and due to “common sense” — but doctors say the decision is the “opposite of common sense.”
In a video message shared on X, Hegseth scoffed that members of the U.S. military were “forced to choose between their conscience and their country” when the Pentagon implemented a since-rescinded COVID-19 vaccine mandate during the Biden administration.
“No more. That era of betrayal is over,” he said. “Under President Trump, the War Department continues to take decisive action to once again restore freedom and strength to our joint force.”
“We’re seizing this moment to discard any absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our war-fighting capabilities,” he continued. “In this case, this includes the universal flu vaccine and the mandate behind it.”
Hegseth said any member of the military who wants the flu vaccine is “free to take it,” but that no one will be forced to do so.
“It’s common sense. It’s the kind of common-sense approach we’re undertaking in this department,” he said.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that the decision is anything but common sense.
“It is the opposite of common sense,” he told HuffPost. “The influenza vaccine is an essential component of force protection and force resiliency. By removing influenza vaccine requirements in the military, he is weakening the military by making it more susceptible to influenza.”
Dr. Jeffrey A Linder, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, thinks it’s ironic that much of the messaging in Hegseth’s Tuesday announcement centered on “freedom” for U.S. troops.
“Our service members give up a lot of freedom to be in the military, and so it’s particularly weird that this one thing is restoring freedom to the military,” he told HuffPost. “Whereas we tell our soldiers and sailors and aviators where to live, where to go, what to do — we literally put them in danger of death. This just seems bizarre to me, from a moral standpoint.”
Doctors are concerned over the Department of Defense’s new stance on the flu vaccine.
Linder said there’s a reason why companies often provide the flu vaccine for their employees at no cost — and it’s not “out of the goodness of their heart.”
It saves them money because it increases the likelihood that fewer people will get sick and miss work, he explained.
“That’s for office settings … but if you think about that in the military, where you have young people in barracks who need to maintain operational readiness, the risk is way higher for the flu spreading through a barracks or a military base or on a ship than it is in an office,” he said.
“So again, it’s completely inconsistent to me that Secretary Hegseth has made such a big deal about lethality and operational readiness — this flies in the face of that,” he added.
Adalja emphasized that troops are at a heightened risk for getting the flu.
“Military populations are often housed [in] enclosed quarters and travel all around the world,” he said, before adding, “The 1918 pandemic was exacerbated by troop movements during World War I and military training camps were hit disproportionately hard.”
Medical experts continue to emphasize that the flu vaccine is safe.
The flu vaccine is “the best way to prevent the flu and its complications for almost everyone,” the Mayo Clinic states. The website notes that while most people with the flu will get better on their own, the virus can cause serious complications for some groups of people.
“It also can lower the risk of having serious illness from the flu and needing to stay in the hospital or dying of the flu,” the website added.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the flu vaccine to all individuals 6 months and older — unless someone has a history of experiencing a severe allergic reaction immediately after receiving a vaccine, which is rare.
Adalja said that he believes vaccine hesitancy overall has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic. “This has been exacerbated by the fact that an anti-vaccine advocate is the head of the Department of Health and Human Services,” he said, referencing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“The influenza vaccine is an extremely safe vaccine that, even when it doesn’t protect against infection, decreases severe complications and decreases contagiousness,” he said. “Highly vaccinated populations are less likely to be disrupted by influenza and to experience high rates of absenteeism — two things that are essential to a resilient military force.”
“The vast majority of us who get the flu, you might feel a little bad or very bad for a few days, but a few people are going to get really sick, a few people are going to wind up in the hospital, and a few people are going to die,” Linder said. “And it’s mostly preventable.”
Linder said that when it comes to recommending the flu vaccine, he shares what he considers when it comes to his own life and the people in it.
“As a doctor, I’m middle-aged but very healthy, and if I get the flu, I’ll probably be fine,” he said. “But I definitely don’t want to spread it to my patients, my loved ones. There is something about herd immunity with getting vaccinated.”
Linder explained that while he can’t 100% say that getting the flu shot is going to prevent the flu for you during any given flu season, “when you play the odds, if you get the flu vaccine, one of these winters that’s gonna prevent you from getting the flu, and it’s probably gonna help prevent the people around you from getting sick, whether they be in civilian or military life.”
And as it relates to Hegseth’s announcement about nixing the flu vaccine requirement, Linder doesn’t understand the reason for putting military members “at risk.”
“The concern is operational readiness. Why are we putting the military at risk of not being an effective fighting force — where that seems to be so important to him?” he said.
